Meet the Executive Director
INSTRUCTOR RA FRYE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Ra Frye is a South Chicago native. As an early teen on course for the typical pipeline of gangs drugs, death, or incarceration, instead, at the hand of his mother, he was extracted to the safety of Denver, Colorado in 1980. Although he escaped the fate of his peers, he would not escape the trauma and impressionable years in Chicago, as they would later unfold amid his family and within his inspired call to purpose.
After relocating to Denver, Ra found a healthier environment that allowed him to thrive. Once struggling academically at Chicago’s Corliss High School, where he earned straight Fs, he transformed into an Honor Roll student in Denver while excelling in both academics and sports. Following graduation, he chose to forfeit college scholarships and entered the workforce as a concrete laborer, quickly advancing to the role of finisher. By 1985, at just twenty years old, Ra had launched his own concrete contracting company, successfully completing major city sidewalk replacement projects.
During a difficult winter slowdown in the concrete industry, however, the lack of income led him back to the destructive survival habits he had learned growing up in Chicago—robbery, drug sales, and eventually addiction. His criminal path came to an abrupt halt after an arrest that nearly resulted in a thirty-year sentence for aggravated robbery. As part of his rehabilitation, Ra entered court-ordered drug treatment and completed 300 hours of community service at a Juvenile Boys Home. It was there that he discovered his true purpose: mentoring incarcerated young boys who lacked the guidance and support he himself had never received. That experience, combined with the birth of his son, became the catalyst for a completely new direction in life.
These times marked the period Ra calls “The Tempering Times,” as he began confronting his
own demons of destructive and dysfunctional behaviors. Ra’s journey to this point prepared him
for the inspired call to purpose in 1993 during Denver’s “Summer of Violence.” The call was to
“Raise cultural awareness” and “Stop the Violence.” Discouraged with the City of Denver’s
neglect of the Black community’s children and city playgrounds, Ra used his own contracting
resources to fund City Park restorations and Recreation Center African Rights of Passages for
neighborhood children. Corporate funding supported Gang Passages in the Rocky Mountains for
warring Crips and Bloods. Denver experienced a forty percent decrease in gang violence.
Gang and Cultural Passages brought traumatizing attacks to a naïve young man who did not yet
understand the science of oppression that included job security for Law Enforcement, the Justice
System, and even the one hundred gang intervention organizations at the time. Denver went from
zero known gangs in 1980 to five thousand at the time Ra joined the theater of gang intervention.
With threats on Ra’s life by local Gang Unit law enforcement, media, and a physical altercation
with a Passage saboteur, Ra made the difficult decision to retreat from the call to lick his wounds
and reflect on the lessons learned. Ra began training in Montessori Education and
homeschooling his own children.
In 2011, untreated childhood trauma and the systemic upheaval with the sudden mass peaceful
Gang Passage movement now converged with the struggles and a strong sense of failure for
ending the Passage process. Ra became increasingly isolated in a period he calls “functionally
broken.” Surfaced acts of abuse would be the collapse of his family. Ra began a journey of self-
care in weekly therapy sessions where he was diagnosed with PTSD and high anxiety disorders.
The lasting effects of unaddressed trauma and lack of self-discipline would be hard to overcome.
Ra spent the following five years training intensely with his now late Grand Master in Kenpo
Martial Arts, delving deeper with his Master Teacher in the ancient art of Egyptian Yoga,
Kemetic philosophy, and drafting a book called Breeding Children. The content of the book’s
final chapter is unfolding in the most likely place—Chicago.
In 2016, Ra made the decision to answer the haunting call to return to his home city of Chicago,
historically plagued with gang violence. His purpose was to activate a more mature version of
the Gang Passage model, this time with the awareness of the social constructs that both
perpetuated gang violence and depended upon its existence. Social and behavioral science
awareness would be his pillars of observation and engagement.
In Chicago, 2017, Ra was introduced to and joined forces with a team of trauma therapists (one a
UC Professor) who expanded Ra’s knowledge and awareness of how trauma affects the brain and
pathways of treating complex trauma. With the support of these partners and other key
introductions, the Pride ROC organization was founded, and its trauma-informed Gang Rescue
and Refinement Passages were activated within a hot three-block radius of the Englewood
community.
To date, Pride ROC, the therapists, and Pioneer Passengers have facilitated sixty-seven Rescue
and Refinement Passages in Cook County Forest Preserves, with one hundred fifty Passengers
from the Englewood community and select cohorts of the Passengers’ mothers.
Ra’s original 2017 vision for Rescue and Refinement Passages was to acquire two hundred acres
of land for a permanent Passage compound. However, four years of Passenger and partnering
organizations’ revolving doors of gaining and sustaining employment opportunities for the
demographic proved the land investment essential to the mission of rescue and refinement—
however, the cart before the horse. With most of the at-risk demographic needing an average of
four jobs to maintain one, Ra learned the importance of keeping Passengers closer when job
training closer while treating many of the traumas they suffered. He now sees our collective
struggle as organizations serving the same demographic to secure sustainable employment
opportunities for our most at-risk young men as a mandate that we invest in a hyperlocal social
enterprise pipeline of employment training and work experience to increase our impact—the
horse in front of the cart.