Many surfers are environmentally aware, but wider community issues often seem to slip out of focus. One more perfect Indonesian barrel can be just another reason to forget that there are plenty of people whose backgrounds may pre-condition them to lives whose absence of stoke is their everyday reality. Fortunately, one initiative in Penzance is helping to ensure that the surfers' term of art, being stoked, is not a description of a feeling confined to an exclusive minority. The Home Office funded Positive Futures project is, according to its website, a “national social inclusion programme using sport and leisure activities to engage with the disadvantaged and socially marginalised young adults.” Positive Futures workers use a variety of sports, and in West Cornwall have found that surfing – for those who would never normally be exposed to it – is working wonders.