Meet the Executive Director
INTRODUCTION OF RA FRYE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
In 1993, amid Denver’s infamous “Summer of Violence,” Ra experienced a spiritual awakening and felt called to stop the violence through a new initiative—Passages.
Ra Frye was born in the 1960s to a fifteen-year-old mother and spent his childhood in a Chicago neighborhood where trauma was an everyday reality. In 1980, recognizing the dangers her teenage son faced—drugs, gangs, violence, incarceration, and even death—his mother made the pivotal decision to send him to the more peaceful surroundings of Denver, Colorado.
In Denver, Ra found relief from the environmental stressors that plagued his early life. Freed from the chaos, he transformed from a failing student in Chicago to an Honor Roll student in Denver. He also excelled in athletics, earning several college scholarship offers. However, he never enrolled, deterred by an injury, lack of mentorship, and the pull of a new romantic relationship.
After graduating high school, Ra began working as a concrete laborer and eventually launched his own contracting company. By the age of nineteen, his company was completing large-scale city sidewalk replacement projects.
However, when winter slowed construction work and financial pressures mounted, Ra reverted to his old ways—engaging in robbery, drug sales, and addiction. He narrowly avoided a 30-year prison sentence and instead entered a court-ordered drug treatment program, along with 300 hours of community service at a juvenile boys’ home. That experience, combined with the presence of his two-year-old son, ignited the next chapter of his life.
This period marked what Ra refers to as his “Tempering Times,” a season of reckoning with his own destructive and dysfunctional patterns. In 1993, amid Denver’s infamous “Summer of Violence,” Ra experienced a spiritual awakening and felt called to stop the violence through a new initiative—Passages. His nonprofit organization began facilitating Passages between warring Crips and Bloods in the Rocky Mountains. Within this framework, rival gang members began to humanize one another, recognizing that their enemies were, in fact, reflections of themselves. The result was a truce that involved nearly half of Denver’s neighborhood gang members.
At the same time, Ra’s contracting company funded the restoration of two long-neglected playgrounds in Denver City Park and launched weekly Cultural Corner classes for school-aged children in local recreation centers.
While the successes of Passages and the Cultural Corner were groundbreaking, they also brought personal danger. Ra faced threats from local law enforcement and physical confrontations with individuals opposed to the success of his work. Over time, Ra came to understand that his most forceful opposition came from those whose livelihoods depended on the very street violence he sought to dismantle.
Ultimately, Ra stepped back from the frontlines to focus on his own family. He pursued training in Montessori education and homeschooled his five children.
In 2011, Ra’s unaddressed traumas collided with financial hardship and a deep sense of failure over the closure of the Gang Passage program. As his family life unraveled, he sought counseling and was eventually diagnosed with post-traumatic stress and anxiety disorders.
He then dedicated the next five years to personal healing—training under the late Grand Master in Kenpo Martial Arts, practicing the ancient Egyptian yoga system Ankh Set, and beginning work on his manuscript, Breeding Children: The Science of Imprints.
In 2016, Ra answered a persistent inner call to return to his hometown of Chicago—by then, an urban war zone—to further develop the Gang Passage model. The following year, he founded Pride ROC in the Englewood neighborhood. Since its founding, Ra and his team have facilitated forty-seven Passages. (Read more here about the Passage model.)
Today, Ra is working to secure funding for Pride ROC’s first rural compound, where he can conduct Passages year-round and continue the work of transforming lives through peace, purpose, and profound human connection.