ZELIENOPLE — The effort to raise money and build a memorial skate park in the borough is getting help from a skateboarding icon.

The Tony Hawk Foundation is helping the memorial skate park committee seek grants and raise money.

Park Association President Jeff Barkley told borough council Monday night that members of the committee met with Hawk when he was in the area to dedicate another skate park his foundation helped build in Carnegie, Allegheny County.

Hawk is an internationally known skateboarder who has won boarding events at the X Games, written skateboarding books and created skateboarding video games.

On Monday council voted to approve the concept of the park, which will allow its committee to seek grants and further pursue the design process.

Mary Pitcher, who led the effort to have the skate park built in Carnegie, has volunteered to help with the Zelienople project and connected the committee with Hawk.

“She hooked the skate park committee up that night with Tony Hawk and his people and he was like: ‘we want you to be our next project’ and they’re already giving us guidance on applying for the grants that they do,” Barkley said.

The Tony Hawk Foundation was founded in 2002 by Hawk with the goal of helping communities build public skate parks to give youngsters a safe and legal place to skate.

Since then it has awarded $5.2 million in grants to 556 skate park projects in the United States, according to its website.

The park would be built in the Zelienople Community Park in memory of three young men, Trevor Barkley, Sam Bucci and Elijah Lunsford, who were killed in a vehicle accident in 2010.

Though a design has not been proposed, Barkley told council the plan is for the park to be free for the public.

It is planned for a 15,000 square-foot space adjacent to the swimming pool and will be funded through a memorial fund that the committee also hopes to use to establish a scholarship program.

So far the committee has raised $132,000 and has hired Grindline Skateparks, a Seattle, Wash.-based firm that also designed the park in Carnegie.

The estimated cost of the park is $450,000, which the committee doesn’t anticipate reaching for several years, Barkley said.

The money raised so far has been from donations, fish dinners and other events which have been well supported by the community, he said.

“The fire department has been behind it in a very good way, obviously because the boys were connected there, but to see the local churches get involved with it has really been spectacular this past year,” Barkley said.

Council member Greg Semel said that the community has supported the project and interest in skateboarding will only increase when the skate park is built.

“The world is changing, it’s evolving. If you go into the park, it will snowball. You’ll have even more people wanting to use it,” he said.