Our Story — Young Warriors Global

Güerote. That's the name I built. Not the one I was born with — the one I chose, the same way the Compass teaches every kid I sit with: choose who you are before your situation chooses for you. To the orphans I work with across Mexico and Central America, I'm Güerote. To the kids in the streets, I'm Güerote. So I am.

I was born in Akron. My father wasn't there. My mother was in addiction. Violence inside the house. Silence outside it. Teachers gave up on me before they tried.

Nobody told me what nobody saw — I wasn't broken. I was just surviving.

This is the story of what happened next.

Chapter One · Akron, Ohio

The dangerous part wasn't on the street. It was inside the front door.

My mother loved me, but she also disappeared for years at a time, lost to her addiction. My father I knew only by name. I survived a house fire, I was homeless, and I lost things kids aren't supposed to know how to lose — before most kids my age even knew what loss was.

By eight, I'd already built my first compass. Not because anyone taught me — because I needed something pointing me somewhere other than where the world was sending me. I didn't know I was building anything at the time. I was just trying not to drown.

That eight-year-old is the architect of everything I do now.

Chapter Two · Los Angeles, California

Same boy. Different city. Same wound.

I left Ohio and told myself it was a fresh start, but it wasn't. I just brought the wound with me. The next stretch was in and out of jail, six years of high school, and burning through every relationship and every job that asked me to be a man I hadn't yet become.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I lost my sister Amanda to heroin. That one doesn't go away. It still hasn't.

I do this for her.

Chapter Three · The Turning Point

The Coma. I was gone. Then I came back.

I survived a coma — and I'm not going to dramatize it. For a stretch, I was gone. When I came back, something inside me had finally cracked open. I didn't get religion. I got honest.

I was tired of being the man my pain had built. Tired of who the streets and the jail cells had carved out of me. And underneath all of it, the eight-year-old who built the first compass was still alive — still pointing, done waiting.

That's when I started becoming.

Chapter Four · The Compass

One man saw who I actually was.

His name was Leo. He didn't write me a check, he didn't fix me, and he didn't hand me a plan. He showed up, and he stayed. Then one day he looked at me and said something nobody had ever said out loud:

"Jason, I see who you actually are."

That was the compass. For the first time in my life, somebody refused to believe I was the story the world had written for me — and the second somebody else stops believing the wrong story about you, you stop believing it too.

What I do now for orphans, for kids in classrooms, for kids in juvy, for kids in churches — that's all I'm trying to give them. Not a curriculum. Not a workbook. A compass. And the truth that somebody finally sees who they actually are.

What The Compass Actually Does

The Compass isn't the healing. It's the navigation.

Trauma hands you an identity. Survival writes the first version of who you are. Most people never know there was a draft. They live the version their pain wrote and call it themselves.

The Compass interrupts that.

It doesn't make the wound go away. It changes who's reading the map.

Before the Compass, every choice is a survival choice. You're not choosing. You're reacting. The wound is driving.

After the Compass, you're navigating from somewhere else. Not from what happened to you. From who you decide to become.

Same kid. Same scars. Different driver.

The wounded child doesn't get erased. He gets a passenger seat instead of the wheel.

And the kid he was supposed to become — finally — gets to drive.

That's all this work is. Helping a kid put down the survival script and pick up the compass.

Chapter Five · Los Angeles · 2010 — still going

I started Young Warriors so no kid would have to wait for their Leo.

In 2010 I founded Young Warriors in LA to walk with the kids who didn't have fathers — the ones the system had already labeled, the ones who reminded me of me. The work never stopped: Grant Elementary, certificate cohorts, field trips, graduations. Hundreds of kids who never had a father becoming men, becoming fathers themselves.

I still live partially in LA, and I still walk those classrooms. The work that was forged there is still alive there. Eric Dickerson came in along the way — Hall of Fame running back, fellow fatherless son, Chief Ambassador, and the kind of friend who shows up when nobody's watching.

LA isn't where this ended. LA is where the kid I used to be became the man who could finally see another kid like him.

Chapter Six · Jalisco, Mexico · 2026

And now I also live where the kids have no one.

I live in Jalisco too now, and every day I'm in an orphanage with kids who have no family, kids the cartels are already recruiting at eleven and twelve years old, and kids who've been handed an identity by everything except themselves. Two weeks, every day. We don't visit — we stay.

The kid who walked in believing he was nothing walks out with his own name, written by his own hand, with his own story and his own compass. That's the work.

The partnerships matter — DIF, Casa Hogars across Mexico, US Casa Hogars next through Children's Services, El Salvador where the vision was born, Philippines and Colombia waiting. But none of that is the point. The point is the kid. The point is the moment a child who was certain he was disposable looks up and realizes someone saw him.

That's what 153 million orphans are waiting for. One at a time. Wherever we get called.

One Last Thing

The Warriors Compass wasn't built in a classroom. It was built in survival.

An eight-year-old boy in Akron with no father figured out what he needed to keep going — and he didn't have words for it at the time, he just lived it. Each one of these came out of something he had to survive. They're not principles or program values. They're scars that learned to point.

Willing. Action. Relentless. Resourceful. Inspired. Optimistic. Responsible. Self-Aware.

I'm the man that little boy created to carry these into the world. The compass is his work — I'm just the courier. Every orphan handed the Playbook is being handed his survival kit. Every Coach carrying the Compass into a school, a church, a juvy — they're carrying that little boy's map. Made for him. Now made for them.

That's why I can't quit. No me sé rajar.

Walk With Us

Two ways to stand with me.

If the story moved you, the next move is yours. There are two ways to be in this work with me.

Adopt a Home.

A $9,000 Legend's Legacy adopts one full orphanage — anywhere we're called. Smaller Legendary Tiers welcome ($25 / $100 / $500 / $1,500 / custom). Every dollar is tracked. Every kid is named.

Adopt a Home See All Tiers

Schedule a call with me.

If you're bringing a country, a Casa Hogar relationship, a multi-home partnership, or you just want to talk founder-to-donor — book a call. I'll be there.

Schedule a Call With Jason

"I didn't inherit direction, safety, or a future. So I built a way out — for the little boy I used to be, and for everyone still trapped in the dark."