Hereford Brazilian Jiu Jitsu has turned the sport’s strong sense of community into a major fundraising effort.
According to sources, the academy, along with its sister school in York, Pennsylvania, pulled in more than $26,000 for cancer research through Tap Cancer Out. It is the nonprofit that has turned the jiu-jitsu world into one of the more unlikely fundraising engines in athletics.
When the totals came in, Hereford’s team stood at the top of the leaderboard, the highest-earning fundraising team in the entire country.
For a gym that had only been open around a year and a half, that kind of result was not something anyone expected walking in.
Owner Richard Keever said the fundraising push grew out of the way the academy tries to operate day to day. Community, he explained, comes before everything else on the mat.
To get there, the gym leaned on nearly every tool it had. Members organized open house style gatherings, ran demonstrations, and offered private lessons, all with proceeds funneled toward the cause.
“We’d set up community days, bring everybody in, we’ll have little circus event type things, demonstrations, we do private classes all for donations,” Keever said.
That mix of grassroots events added up quickly, and Keever said the response reflects something built into the sport itself. Jiu-jitsu, at its core, asks practitioners to look out for the person next to them, and he sees fundraising as a natural extension of that mindset.
“That’s like the theme of being a martial artist, is the mutual benefit and welfare of others and if we’re in a position to help others, we should be,” he said.
That philosophy is also at the heart of Tap Cancer Out, the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu-based nonprofit founded by Jon Thomas. The organization was born from Thomas’ desire to bring philanthropy into a sport that had become such an important part of his own life.
Thomas first discovered jiu-jitsu after playing volleyball in college. Once he graduated, he found that the team-sport environment he had enjoyed was difficult to replicate. Jiu-jitsu gave him a similar sense of community while allowing him to compete individually.
“With jiu-jitsu it scratched the itch of sort of being MMA adjacent. It was an amazing workout. I had a team but when it came to competing I could just sign on the dotted line and go compete,” Thomas said during an interview.
That connection eventually became the foundation for something much bigger.
Thomas was inspired to create Tap Cancer Out after losing his nephew Michael to cancer in 2006. At a philanthropy awards dinner years later, he found himself wondering what he was doing to contribute to the battle against cancer. Rather than simply attach a charity campaign to jiu-jitsu, he decided the sport itself needed to be at the center of the mission.
“Whatever Tap Cancer Out’s going to be, it has to be truly jiu-jitsu,” he said.
In 2012, Thomas organized the first Tap Cancer Out tournament in Connecticut. He initially thought raising $5,000 would be a reasonable target. Instead, competitors raised nearly $20,000 at the inaugural event, proving that the jiu-jitsu community could turn its competitive energy into something far beyond medals and brackets.
The idea continued to grow. Thomas eventually left his agency job in 2018 to run Tap Cancer Out full-time, and the nonprofit expanded into a nationwide fundraising network. Since its first event, Tap Cancer Out says the jiu-jitsu community has raised and donated more than $7.75 million.
That growth has also allowed the organization to experiment with new ways of bringing grapplers together. During the pandemic, Thomas launched Global Grappling Day, a virtual event that allowed participants to roll for an hour wherever they were. The format helped keep the community connected when gyms and tournaments were shut down and has continued even after the return to normal competition.
But despite the millions raised, Thomas’ focus remains on the individual gyms and fundraisers that make the larger movement possible.
Tap Cancer Out doesn’t simply measure success through who wins matches. Its events recognize the people and teams that generate the most support, whether that comes from asking family members for donations, organizing local events or convincing teammates to contribute.
“We celebrate the top overall fundraiser, the top youth fundraiser, the top fundraising team,” Thomas said. “I care about how much we fundraise and I care about people’s experience.”
That is what makes Hereford’s $26,000-plus effort stand out. The number isn’t simply a fundraising total; it represents an entire local community deciding to turn its shared passion for jiu-jitsu into support for people fighting cancer.
None of it would have worked without the people showing up outside of class, too. Keever pointed to the surrounding community as the real driver behind the number, crediting neighbors and local supporters who turned out not just to train, but to back a cause that reached well beyond the gym’s walls.
“We’re in line with the community and they’ve been amazing with showing up and supporting us, coming to class and doing jiu jitsu,” he said.
Tap Cancer Out has spent more than a decade building partnerships like this one across the country, connecting gyms to a shared mission of funding cancer research and support services through the sport itself.
For Hereford, being able to plug into that network and direct the results toward something bigger than a trophy case stood out as the real win.
“And the fact that we were able to lean on them to get fundraising for those impacted by cancer, it was huge,” Keever said.
With the first year now in the books, the gym is not treating $26,000 as a ceiling. Keever said the plan is to build on the momentum and aim even higher when the next fundraising cycle comes around, betting that the same community spirit that carried this year’s effort will keep growing alongside the academy itself.
