As many of our practitioners and students that attend the outdoor academy classes know, one of our regular spots is the hugely popular Heygate estate in Elephant and Castle. Unfortunately this beautiful urban jungle of trees and buildings has been scheduled to be redeveloped into medium high-rise density housing.

We are pleased to announce the recent start of a new project entitled Evolve, the brainchild of film-maker and long time Academy practitioner, Karen Palmer. This project consists of two elements - Evolve 0.1: the training programme for young people, and Evolution: a new creative commission from Karen.

Tonight we begin a series of workshops for Three Rivers District Council in Hertfordshire, being held at William Penn Leisure Centre, Mill End, Rickmansworth, WD3 8JN. The sessions are part of the Mill End Youth Project and will be running Friday evenings from 6-7.30pm and are open to all.

We have recently been engaged once again by proactive arts charity All Change to bring parkour into their Urban Arts Academy project. The programme is being run in conjunction with Islington Borough council and is being funded by The London Development Agency's 2012 London Cultural Skills Fund. The project sees us delivering a number of parkour workshops for young people from January to March in the borough, and so far has been going extremely well. More updates to follow.

As part of Islington's Proactive Festival this coming Saturday, we will be testing people's Comfort Zone with a range of activities exploring how we feel moving through the urban environment. The Comfort Zone Project is a creative investigation in conjunction with arts group All Change into the science of fear and our response to the urban environment. Through the practice of parkour, performance and film, a team of artists, scientists and young people in Islington are exploring our fight or flight instinct.

Erect Architecture is an award winning group of London-based architects whose most recent project is to create a series of innovative playgrounds that appropriate forgotten spaces and found objects to challenge and expand the conception of play. Parkour Generations has been approached to provide the unique insight parkour offers for the construction and use of these structures in these spaces, leading to workshops for young people on these sites during their development.

Yesterday evening saw the launch event hosted at the Arsenal Emirates Stadium for the groudbreaking project with arts group All Change, studying the science of fear through parkour.

Nine members of Westminister sports unit will be running in the Flora London Marathon on the 26th April 2009 to raise money for one of their partner organisations, The Avenues Youth Project, which is one of the locations we teach our EDUTAIN scheme and was featured heavily in the Jump Westminster documentary. If you can please sponsor them at www.justgiving.com/teamavenues2009 to help raise funds for this very worthwhile organisation.

The ongoing groudbreaking project with arts group All Change, studying the science of fear, recommences for 2009 next week with workshop sessions for the young people involved. Through the practice of parkour - combined with creative writing, dance, sound and film - an eclectic group of young people, elite artists and scientists will investigate the science of fear and behavioural response when we step outside of our comfort zone.