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Snoopy I Am Currently Unsupervised I Know It Freaks Me Out Too But The Possibilities Are Endless Shirt, hoodie, tank top

Despite her abilities, Shiraishi was an outlier in the climbing world, which was, and still is, overwhelmingly made up of well-off white people. “When I started climbing, there was not a lot of diversity,” she says. “I think in New York, it’s special because it’s a diverse hub of different people. But when I started, it was still mostly people who were rich and could afford to go to the climbing gyms. Who even knew what climbing was.”

Over Zoom one afternoon in April, Shiraishi, wearing a coveted Bernie Sanders bootleg tee, recounts one story from when she was only seven or eight and competing for the first time—the moment she became keenly aware of the class disparities in the sport she loves. “My parents couldn’t afford to get me to the nationals, even though I qualified for it,” she says. “I did the regionals, the divisionals, and all of these competitions that lead to these big championships and all that. My parents couldn’t afford to get me a trip down there.” Luckily, some folks at a local gym, Brooklyn Boulders, decided to sponsor her trip if she wore a T-shirt with the establishment’s logo on it. “After that event, I went there and I won nationals,” she says. “And that was the first time I put my name on the stage.”

Now Shiraishi’s paying that same generosity forward and intends to use her platform to achieve dreams bigger than climbing. She was just accepted to both UCLA and Berkeley and wants to start a clothing line, inspired by the pants her parents made for her. (She’s kicking around a few monikers for the line, either her own name or Tamashii, from the Japanese word that means “soul.”) But mostly she wants to use her popularity to make climbing more inclusive. Less white. She recently launched a nonprofit called All Rise, along with Kyle Ng and Gavin Dogan of the brand Brain Dead and Grayston Leonard of Long Beach Rising. This spring they built a free-to-access climbing wall at the Long Beach Rising gym in Long Beach, California—which happens to be my hometown. The goal is to give people from the local community greater access to climbing by providing a free space to practice and take part in a new activity. I tell Shiraishi that her initiative is something that my childhood friends and I would have loved when we were younger.

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