zion snowboards

While you’re out shreddin, making turns and having a good time with your friends, someone’s life could be making a turn for the better.  How is this possible?  Through the ZION POP program.

The ZION POP (People Of the Planet) program is people driven and all about Social Justice. We have made it our mission to help out our fellow humans who have been dealt a bad hand. This is the part of ZION Snowboards that we call ’serious fun’. There are some hardcore issues happening in our world and we thought it would be rad to involve core snowboarders in making a difference. With the POP program we will be donating 10% of the sale of our participating products to charities that help make people’s lives better*. Cool thing is – you can do this while you’re doing your switch backside 10’s or Tindy’s!

ZION is stoked to announce that our first partnership for the POP program will be the Ratanak Foundation’s New Song Project.

The New Song Project is dedicated to fighting child sex trafficking in Cambodia. We met up with Brian McConaghy, the Founder of the Ratanak Foundation and were floored after hearing about what was going on in the brothels in Cambodia with children as young as 5 years old. These children are being violated 10-20 times a day for a cost of two dollars per customer. Young virgins can go for up to five hundred dollars because customers that have AIDS believe they will be cured if they have sex with a virgin. You can imagine the devastation that this brings. The New Song Project is all about rescuing these children and rehabilitating them so that they can learn what if means to be a normal human being. The children that are rescued are brought to a top secret, high security location where they are in rehab for about 2 years. They are taught to be children again – most of them do not know what being a child is – they never got the chance. This rescue operation is not a cake walk – this is secret mission, “Chuck Norris” kind of stuff because the kids need to be extracted from the brothels and pimps and then secretly brought to a safe location. As you can imagine the pimps do not want to lose their ‘product’ so this is a very dangerous job for the rescuers whose lives are at risk every time they do a rescue operation.