Ray Freeman was 12 years old, riding his bike through Kansas City, Kansas, when a police officer stopped him and told him he wasn't going home. That afternoon became the first of what Ray now calls multiple lifetimes. He spent the next six years in eight different foster homes, aged out at 18, and stumbled into adulthood with no driver's license, no savings, and no idea how to hold a job. Today he runs One Community Jiu Jitsu Club, a Wyandotte County nonprofit built on a $5,000 grant, a $1,200 GoFundMe, and a refusal to take zero days.
What You'll Hear
- Why Ray calls his own life "multiple lifetimes" and the three specific moments he says marked the end of each one
- What happened the day Child Protective Services pulled him off his bike in the sixth grade
- The math of eight foster homes in six years and what that does to friendships and hobbies
- How aging out at 18 went sideways in a Junction City apartment he couldn't afford
- The soccer mom who choked Ray unconscious on his first visit to an MMA gym and instantly humbled him
- How three training partners showing up to move his pregnant wife's couch reframed what family meant
- Why Ray chose the nonprofit route instead of opening a traditional Brazilian Jiu Jitsu gym in Wyandotte County
- The Reddit-born "no more zero days" rule Ray credits for every dollar One Community has raised
The day the rug got pulled out from under a sixth grader
Ray opens the conversation on the same ground that still anchors most of his work. He was 12, born and raised in Kansas City, Kansas, the oldest of his siblings. A report brought Child Protective Services and the police into his family's life that day. The officer found Ray on his bike. He confirmed his name. He never went home again.
He asks Sam to put himself in a 12-year-old's head for a minute. At that age you have hobbies, a circle of friends, a working theory of how the world fits together. Ray had all of that. Then he was living with a completely different family, and then another one, and then another. Over the next six years he cycled through eight guardians. He briefly left Kansas during an attempted adoption by a relative in Texas, which fell through and landed him back in Kansas City.
Ray is careful to correct the picture most people carry from movies. There was no adoption day, no room full of hopeful parents interviewing older kids. He spent time in a group home supervised by social workers. He and his sisters were eventually split up across the state. He says the family connection with his sisters never fully reset after that. They're still in touch. The relationships are not what they were.
Aging out with no license, no savings, and no script
Ray aged out of foster care at 18. His guardian at the time sat him down that summer and told him he needed to be out. He moved in with a friend from the Junction City high school he'd graduated from. He didn't have a driver's license. He didn't have a car. He didn't know how to pay bills or hold a job. He says plainly that he was a bad roommate, and the arrangement fell apart.
He ended up at Kansas State in a way that wasn't really enrollment at first. He was crashing with friends in the dorms. He credits two of those friends by name, Adrael and Dirks, with walking him through the FAFSA, pointing him at actual enrollment, and pulling him onto a more stable track. His first real full-time job was a year at the Taco Bell inside the K-State union. Sprint came after that, and stayed the longest.
When Comcast recruited him away from Sprint, Ray learned a lesson he repeats in the episode. To be taken seriously by the company that already has you, you sometimes have to collect experience somewhere else first. He jumped between jobs after that and doesn't apologize for it. The framing matters because it sets up the later decision. The person who learned to stack paychecks, switch roles, and build a resume from nothing is the same person who later walks away from all of it to start a nonprofit.
Getting humbled by a soccer mom and finding a family
Ray did not grow up planning to train Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. A roommate at K-State who fought MMA tried to drag him into a gym for years. Ray said no every time. He was a fan of the sport from the outside, the Anderson Silva and Ronda Rousey era, but he didn't want to get hurt and he didn't want to hurt anyone else.
What finally pulled him in was weight. His wife Kat, whom he'd met at K-State when he was 21, was cooking meals he couldn't stop eating. He walked into a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu gym in 2015 looking for conditioning. On that first visit a soccer mom taking a private lesson caught him in a rear naked choke and put him out fast. He calls it instantly humbling. He kept showing up anyway.
Six months in, Ray realized the training was doing more for him mentally than physically. The room was full of people he would not have met anywhere else in his life. Professional fighters. Business owners. Doctors. Local celebrities. He'd grown up in Wyandotte County, where he cites a poverty rate around 18 percent and a per-capita income close to $30,000 a year, and here he was sharing mat time and honest conversations with a crowd he'd previously only seen from a distance.
The moment that sealed it came when Kat was pregnant in 2015 and they needed to move. Ray had no family to lean on. Foster care hadn't given him one. He called guys from the gym. Three of them showed up. His wife was wobbling out of the apartment and his training partners were carrying a couch. He says that was the moment he understood he had a family, finally, at a gym. He hadn't had that before.
Why a nonprofit, and why Wyandotte County
When Ray's original gym, American Top Team, closed, he started looking at the map. The Kansas City metro had roughly two dozen Brazilian Jiu Jitsu facilities at the time. Wyandotte County had none. He started asking why. The honest answers pointed at income, health outcomes, and the simple fact that the kind of community he'd just found on the mats wasn't reachable for most of the kids growing up a few blocks from him.
He was already working at the Learning Club of KCK, an after-school tutoring program. He watched a pattern there. The young men in the program often didn't want another hour of homework after a full day of school. They wanted to move. They wanted something physical. Ray remembered being that age. He started thinking about jiu jitsu not as a sport but as a delivery mechanism for mentorship.
He tried to run a jiu jitsu program under the Learning Club's umbrella first. It didn't come together. Brad Grabs, the founder of the Learning Club, became an early mentor anyway. Ray credits him with teaching him that a nonprofit is still a business, with overhead, payroll, and the same basic math as any other operation. That reframing mattered. Ray had no path to a traditional business loan. He didn't yet have the knowledge for it. But a 501(c)(3) was something he could start from scratch, with a board, a story, and a mission that the jiu jitsu community in Kansas City might actually rally behind.
The board he eventually assembled is the real tell. Ray as founder. His wife Kat as secretary. Ricky Moritz, his long-term training partner and a brown belt. Brayden Posey, a purple belt and co-owner of Kitsch Meals and Scissors and Scotch. Jason Bercher, a black belt and head of KCBJJ, widely regarded in Ray's words as the grandfather of jiu jitsu in Kansas City. Jeff Molina, another training partner and UFC fighter ranked 15 at flyweight at the time. Andrew, owner of Nail Perfection and Spa. Ray got there by leaning on the network and, in his own phrase, begging these guys to help bring the vision to life.
A $5,000 grant, a 700-square-foot classroom, and no more zero days
The founding money came in pieces. Ray ran a GoFundMe on his Twitter account and raised roughly $1,200. During the same stretch he met a woman working at an organization focused on alleviating trauma in Wyandotte County. He told her the long version of his story. She wrote One Community a $5,000 grant. That bought the mats.
The first home was a 700-square-foot classroom at the former Blessed Sacrament Elementary School on 22nd and Parallel in Kansas City, Kansas. The chalkboards were still on the wall. Ray couldn't pay instructors. He couldn't pay himself. He taught for free and kept his day job. That is where One Community Jiu Jitsu Club was born, and the business plan, such as it was, ran on a rule Ray says he picked up from a Reddit post nine years earlier. No more zero days. Every single day, do something toward the goal. A thought counts. A conversation counts. Research counts. The size of the step is negotiable. The existence of the step is not.
The long-term vision hasn't moved. Ray wants Brazilian Jiu Jitsu inside the public school system in Wyandotte County. He's watched it reshape behavior in his own students, some in a week, some in a month, in ways he doesn't think another intervention could replicate. A kid who needs confidence hits a tripod sweep and walks off the mat taller. A kid who needs to be humbled feels honest top pressure for the first time. Ray says plainly that he would not be carrying this conversation with Sam in complete sentences if he hadn't trained. He credits the mats with his vocabulary, his confidence, and the fact that he can sit across from anyone, from a UFC fighter to a funder, and hold his own. Adults are welcome at One Community too. You can find Ray at One Community Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or under some version of Ray Freeman BJJ on most handles.
About Ray Freeman
Ray Freeman is the founder and executive director of One Community Jiu Jitsu Club, a Wyandotte County nonprofit offering accessible Brazilian Jiu Jitsu instruction with the goal of bringing the sport into public schools. Born and raised in Kansas City, Kansas, Ray spent six years in foster care across eight homes before aging out at 18. He started training jiu jitsu in 2015, is a purple belt, and lives in Kansas City with his wife Kat. One Community Brazilian Jiu Jitsu