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Sixteen-year-old Raelyn stands in a kitchen checking whether the fries have turned the right shade of gold. Her twin brother Raymel works the front room, straightening a crooked chair before anyone even notices it. Both teens work at Buckets, the new restaurant LeBron James opened in Akron, Ohio. It is their first real job. But the twins say what they found there goes far beyond a paycheck. They call it family.
Buckets belongs to the LeBron James Family Foundation and serves fried chicken, smashburgers, and dips inside a community space called House Three Thirty. James described his goal for the restaurant in an email to PEOPLE. "We wanted to create a place where people feel right at home in our community and can come gather over some great food," he said. He added that creating jobs for local kids mattered just as much as the food itself.
Raelyn and Raymel are not random hires. Both grew up in Akron's I Promise Program, a support system James built for local students and their families. That history shapes everything about how the twins talk about their jobs now, from the coworkers who tease them like siblings to the mother who works down the hall from them. Their story starts long before the restaurant's doors opened.
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Working Alongside Family Members Is Built Into How Buckets Hires
Buckets was designed to employ families already connected to the I Promise Program, not just individual teenagers looking for summer work. Raymel joined the program's very first third-grade class back in 2018. Today he works as a server. Raelyn works in the kitchen after the restaurant's director of culinary, Aaron Blank, encouraged her to apply based on her culinary classes in high school. Their mother, Janette, also works at House Three Thirty as operations manager.
That family connection runs directly through their daily shifts. "It's really fun and reassuring to know that I work with like my literal blood," Raymel says. LeBron James pointed to Janette's presence as proof of something deeper than convenience. "I'm so proud to see people like Raelyn and Raymel work their first full-time jobs at our restaurant, and even prouder that their mom... has that trust in us," he says.
Working with actual relatives is only part of what the twins describe. The rest of the staff has folded into that same sense of closeness, teasing them and checking on them the way relatives would. That blurred line between coworker and family member is not an accident. It reflects a foundation slogan the twins say they did not fully believe until they started clocking in themselves.
'We Are Family' Stopped Being a Slogan Once the Twins Started Working There
The LeBron James Family Foundation has used the phrase "we are family" for years as a general mission statement. Raelyn admits she used to hear it as exactly that, a nice slogan attached to a helpful organization. Working inside Buckets changed her mind entirely. "When I got in the workspace, I was like, 'oh, like we're really family,'" she says, describing coworkers who check in on each other during hard times.
That closeness shows up in small, specific moments on the job. Raymel learned attention to detail from House Three Thirty's director of events, Vaughn Myers, who the twins call "Peanut." "Even if I'm bussing down the table... and there's like the slightest bit of a crooked chair, I just go and fix it," Raymel says. Myers also taught Raelyn financial literacy, including a rule she now repeats herself: don't buy something once if you can't buy it again.
Both twins describe their roles as far more layered than a simple job title suggests. "Nobody at the front is only doing one thing," Raymel explains, describing servers who bus tables and hosts who help in the kitchen when needed. Raelyn tracks food levels in real time, asking whether the kitchen has enough chicken or needs to slow down. Those daily habits are quietly building skills neither twin expected to walk away with.
The Twins See Their Own Futures Taking Shape Inside a Restaurant Built on Someone Else's Legacy
Raymel and Raelyn are not just clocking hours until graduation. Raymel wants to become a vendor and eventually run his own business. Raelyn is weighing psychology or dental hygiene, drawn toward work that helps people either emotionally or medically. Neither dream came out of nowhere. Both twins point directly to lessons picked up at Buckets, from financial literacy to the discipline of noticing small details other people miss.
Raelyn traces her admiration for James back to what he built beyond basketball, including the I PROMISE Village, which offers short-term housing to families facing hardship. "A lot of families benefit now from what he has done with the community," she says. James himself frames the restaurant as part of that same mission. "I hope their experience... gives them the skills and the support system to be successful in anything they want to do in life," he says.
What makes this restaurant different is not the menu or the name attached to it. It is the fact that two teenagers can point to a specific chair they straightened, a specific lesson about not overspending, a specific person who taught it to them, and call all of it evidence of family. For Raymel and Raelyn, a first job became something closer to proof that a community built around them was never just a slogan at all.
