Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life – Help Us Build Our Home

“Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life – Help Us Build Our Home”

“Jiu-Jitsu didn’t just change my life – it saved it.”

My name is Axel, and I’ve been battling lupus for years. Chronic pain, fatigue, and emotional struggle were part of my daily life. Then I found Jiu-Jitsu — and more importantly, I found Coach Alberto Montes.

I became his first student, and he became the mentor who helped me find strength, resilience, and purpose. He awarded me his first blue belt, and since then, I’ve watched our family grow from just two people training in whatever space we could find, to a team of 20+ dedicated students.

Over the past few years, we’ve moved from five different temporary locations — storages, borrowed mats, sublets — always grinding, always training. And at the heart of it all is Coach Alberto: kind, crazy, hilarious, gentle, and relentless. He’s given everything — even going homeless at times — just to make sure we all had a place to train. He never took a single dollar for himself. Every cent goes into rent, utilities, and mats.

Now, we finally have a chance to build a permanent home — a real gym of our own, in a location that allows us to grow bigger than we ever dreamed.

But we can’t do it alone.

We’re looking to raise $30,000 to cover rent, a security deposit, and to mat the floors and walls of our future gym with top-quality Fuji mats. This isn’t just a gym — it’s our community, our therapy, our lifeline.

If you’ve ever trained, or been touched by someone who trains, you know what this means.

Help us give back to a man who has never stopped giving to others — even when he had nothing.

Let’s give Coach Alberto — and our Jiu-Jitsu family — the dojo we deserve.