About FreedomBikes25-Run It™

My time in the system started in fifth grade. I was being sexually harassed on my walk home from school. I told people. I said no. Nobody did anything about it. So I brought a switchblade to school and handled it myself — and it worked, the harassment stopped. It also got me expelled. That was the first time I learned that fighting could solve a problem nobody else would touch. It became the pattern for most of my life.

I didn't have the pause. I had the fight.

My grandmother was a police officer. I grew up in law enforcement, so I've lived on both sides of this system — the badge and the cell.

I also built things. I opened my first brick-and-mortar business at 25, in 2005, and I ran small businesses for the next twenty years. I bought my own condo at 23 and kept it for twenty years. I know what it takes to build something from nothing. I know boots-on-the-ground work, because I've lived it. What most people didn't know: I was carrying an addiction through almost all of it. I didn't get sober until 2025.

I was arrested more times than I can count. Through every one of them, I never stopped building. Looking back was never an option for me. I know now it's because I had a greater mission ahead of me — I just didn't know it yet.

While I was inside a correctional facility, I watched smart, capable women lose control in seconds — not because they were bad people, but because nobody had ever taught them how to find the space between what happens and how they react to it.

Staff would yell "Calm down," or "Lockdown" over the intercom. Sometimes it worked. At times, it escalated the situation further.

In my own recovery, I got quiet. I started meditating. I started talking to God, and I asked what I was supposed to do with everything I'd been through. The answer: do the work, build the tool, close the gap.

So I built Freedom Bikes 25 - Run It™. Not from a distance — from inside it, on both sides of it, and from twenty years of building things with my own hands while carrying a weight most people never saw.

The people we work with aren't underserved because they're incapable. They're underserved in one specific skill: the pause. Their parents weren't taught it, and so their children won't be taught it either — unless someone closes the gap.

Run It closes that gap. It's the same discipline the military calls the tactical pause and athletes train for at the highest level — built for the people who need it most, and for the officer standing next to them.

If you're reading this, you've probably already chosen to have a seat at the table. You've taken your life's work and created systems that bridge social divides and help uplift vulnerable populations. We're not asking you for anything — you've already done that work. We're here to show you a tool we built that helps carry that torch further into the future.

— Ashley Brooke, Founder & CEO