A five-year-old in a red winter coat. A cold Chicago sidewalk in December 2012. A single small question that became, three years later, a global movement.
December 2012. Chicago, Illinois. A five-year-old boy named Jahkil Naeem Jackson walked through the cold streets of his neighborhood with his aunt, helping her hand out warm food to people who were sleeping in doorways. When he got home that night, he asked his parents — Na-Tae' and Jamiel Jackson — a very specific question: "Can we give them all houses?" His parents, gently, explained that they could not. So Jahkil — at age five — asked them what else they could do. Three years later, at age 8, Jahkil organized his own birthday party at a Chicago arcade and asked his friends to bring "toiletries instead of presents." They filled the first twenty-five "Blessing Bags." Eleven years later, in early 2026, Jahkil Jackson is 18 years old, 6'3", a student-athlete at Spire Academy, a three-time best-selling author, and the founder of a global nonprofit called Project I Am that has distributed more than 75,000 Blessing Bags, raised nearly $1 million, and directly impacted approximately 300,000 people across the United States, Ghana, Swaziland, Guatemala, the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, and India. This is his story.
Winter 2012: A Five-Year-Old, His Aunt, and a Cold Chicago Sidewalk
To understand who Jahkil Jackson is — and how a small Chicago boy ended up, by his eighteenth birthday, having quietly redirected the early American childhoods of thousands of other children — you have to start in a specific apartment in a specific Chicago neighborhood, in the small private weekend rituals of one specific extended Black family, in the winter of 2012-2013.
Jahkil Naeem Jackson was, at that point, five years old. He was the only child of Jamiel Jackson, a small business consultant, and Na-Tae' Jackson, who worked in early childhood education. The Jackson family lived in a modest apartment on the South Side of Chicago. They were, by the small careful standards of working-middle-class Black Chicago, doing fine. They were not wealthy. They were not poor. They paid their rent every month. They had Sunday dinner with extended family. Both parents took their only child everywhere with them — including on the Saturday mornings when Jahkil's aunt led a volunteer food-distribution group through downtown Chicago.
A Family Tradition of Saturday Morning Food Distribution
Jahkil's aunt — who has politely declined to be publicly named in any of his subsequent interviews — had been volunteering with a small Chicago church-based group called Holiday for Hope for several years before Jahkil started joining her. The group, run primarily by Black women in their forties and fifties, met every Saturday morning at a small church on the South Side, packed approximately one hundred small bags of warm food and bottled water, and then drove a route through downtown Chicago handing out the bags to people sleeping in doorways, under bridges, and in heated subway entrances.
In the late autumn of 2012, when Jahkil was five and had just started kindergarten, his aunt asked Na-Tae' if she could take Jahkil along on a Saturday run. Na-Tae' said yes. She had been wanting, for several months, to find a small age-appropriate way to introduce Jahkil to the small careful Black tradition of "service to the community" that had been a central part of her own childhood. That first Saturday — a clear cold December morning in 2012, with about three inches of snow on the ground — Jahkil went out with his aunt in a small bright red winter coat his grandmother had given him for his fifth birthday.
"I Thought Everybody Had Houses"
The thing Jahkil Jackson has, in every subsequent interview from age eight to age eighteen, returned to — the small specific cognitive moment that started the rest of his life — is what happened in his five-year-old head as he handed bags of food to adults sleeping in doorways. He had not, until that morning, understood that some adults did not have houses. Five-year-olds, in his honest later description to GoFundMe's True Stories of Good People podcast, "don't really understand that homelessness exists." They assume, with the small unbroken logic that small children apply to a world they are only beginning to map, that every adult, by default, has a place to go home to at night.
" I really didn't understand, because at five years old I thought that everybody had homes. I was really confused. I went home and asked my parents if we could give them all houses. — Jahkil Jackson, age 13, looking back at age 5
Jahkil's mother Na-Tae' has, in her own later interviews, described what it looked like from her side. That first Saturday afternoon, when Jahkil and his aunt got home, Jahkil sat at the kitchen table with his red winter coat still on and asked, in the very direct way of five-year-olds, the question that would shape the next thirteen years of his life.
The Kitchen Table Brainstorm: 2012-2014
What happened next — what made Jahkil Jackson's particular story different from the thousands of other small American children who ask similar questions at similar ages and then move on to whatever else is on their kindergarten plate that week — was, in retrospect, a very specific small parental decision.
Na-Tae' and Jamiel Jackson, sitting in their South Side Chicago kitchen that December evening, made a small private agreement. They were going to take their five-year-old son's question seriously. They were not going to brush him off. They were not going to wait for him to forget about it. They were going to sit down with him, that night and on subsequent nights, and help him brainstorm — at five-year-old level — what specifically a small Chicago kid could realistically do to help adult strangers without houses.
"What Do They Have, and What Do They Not Have?"
The first brainstorming session, by both parents' subsequent accounts, was very simple. Na-Tae' got out a yellow legal pad. She wrote two column headings: "What homeless adults have" and "What homeless adults don't have." Jahkil — sitting cross-legged on a kitchen chair with his crayon in his hand — started naming things. "They don't have houses." Na-Tae' wrote it down. "They don't have showers." She wrote it down. "They don't have toothbrushes." She wrote it down. "They don't have socks. They don't have soap. They don't have water. They don't have food. They don't have hats. They don't have warm gloves."
By the end of an hour, the right-hand column of the yellow legal pad had approximately twenty-five items on it. The left-hand column had three.
The Idea Crystallizes Over Three Years
Over the next three years — from age five to age eight — Jahkil Jackson did two things in parallel. He continued, every Saturday morning when his aunt was available, to go on the food distribution rounds. He got better at handing people the warm bags of food. He started, by age six, to remember some of the regulars — the older Black man who slept under the I-90 overpass and always thanked him in the same careful voice; the younger white woman who sat outside the Walgreens on State Street and was always polite to him. And in parallel, slowly, over hundreds of small kitchen-table conversations with his parents, Jahkil refined the idea that would eventually become Project I Am.
The core idea was very simple. If five-year-old Jahkil Jackson could not afford to buy people houses — which had been his original instinct — he could probably afford, with help, to put together small bags of the daily-use items that he had on his column-two list. He would call them Blessing Bags. He would hand them out in person, the way his aunt handed out food. He would, in his own subsequent description, "do the part I can do."
January 2015: The Birthday Party Where He Asked for Toiletries Instead of Presents
Jahkil Jackson's eighth birthday — January 2015 — was the moment Project I Am formally began.
His parents had asked him, several weeks earlier, what kind of birthday party he wanted. He had asked for a party at one of the small local Chicago arcades — the kind of party with pizza, video games, and approximately fifteen of his second-grade friends. Na-Tae' booked the arcade. She sent out the invitations. And on the bottom of the invitation, in small careful eight-year-old handwriting that Jahkil had himself dictated to her, was a single specific request:
"Instead of birthday presents, please bring toiletries (toothpaste, soap, socks, granola bars, water bottles) to put in Blessing Bags for people without homes. Thank you for helping me help my city."
Twenty-Five First Bags
Approximately fifteen of Jahkil's second-grade friends came to the party. Most of them brought toiletries. By the end of the party — somewhere around 4 PM that Saturday afternoon — Jahkil, his parents, and his aunt had assembled, on the floor of the arcade's back party room, twenty-five Blessing Bags. Each bag contained: a small bar of soap, a travel toothbrush, travel toothpaste, two pairs of new socks (the kind on the multi-pack at Costco), a small bottle of hand sanitizer, a small package of wet wipes, two granola bars, and a 500ml bottle of water.
The next morning — Sunday — Jahkil, Na-Tae', and Jamiel drove the family's Honda Civic from the South Side into downtown Chicago. They parked near State Street. They walked four blocks. Jahkil handed out, one at a time, to twenty-five different people in twenty-five different doorways, the bags he had collected at his arcade birthday party the previous day. His mother has said, in subsequent interviews, that the look on her son's face on the drive home — quiet, sober, slightly stunned, with the small specific intentness of an eight-year-old who has just understood something important about how the world works — is something she has never forgotten.
2015-2017: The "Pull Over!" Years
Between January 2015 and the autumn of 2017 — Jahkil's third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade years — Project I Am grew, slowly, from "twenty-five bags at a birthday party" to something with its own small momentum.
The Family Rule in the Honda Civic
One of the small specific habits the Jackson family developed during this period — a habit Jahkil has subsequently mentioned in approximately forty different interviews — was what they came to call the "Pull Over!" rule. The Jacksons drove around Chicago with a stockpile of approximately fifty Blessing Bags in the trunk of their car at any given time. Whenever Jahkil, in the backseat of the Civic, spotted somebody on the sidewalk who he thought might need a bag, he was authorized to call out, loudly, the words "Pull Over!" Jamiel — or Na-Tae', whoever was driving — would, when traffic and parking allowed, pull over. Jahkil would get out of the car. He would hand the person a bag. He would say, in the small polite Chicago voice his aunt had taught him on the original food-distribution route, "Excuse me, ma'am. Excuse me, sir. I made this for you. I hope it helps."
From Twenty-Five Bags to Five Thousand
By the end of 2015 — Jahkil's eighth-grade year — Project I Am had distributed approximately 500 Blessing Bags. By the end of 2016, the number was 1,500. By the end of 2017 — when Jahkil was 10 years old — the running total was approximately 5,000 bags, distributed across Chicago, Los Angeles (during a family vacation to visit Jahkil's grandmother), Atlanta, and Washington, D.C.
The Jacksons had, by this point, set up Project I Am as a formal 501(c)(3) nonprofit. They had a small donations page on a basic WordPress website Jamiel had built himself. They had several local Chicago corporate sponsors — including a small regional pharmacy chain that donated unsold toothpaste and a Chicago-area sock company that donated overstock. By the autumn of 2017, Jahkil Jackson — age 10 — had been written up by the Chicago Sun-Times, profiled on local NBC Chicago, and invited to give a small talk at his school's all-grades assembly.
November 2017: The Day President Barack Obama Tweeted About Him
The thing that, in retrospect, changed the trajectory of Project I Am from a small successful Chicago neighborhood nonprofit into a national movement was a single tweet posted by a specific former U.S. President on a specific Tuesday afternoon in late November 2017.
"One of the Three Most Influential People of 2017"
In November 2017 — ten months out of the White House — President Barack Obama, working through the newly-formed Obama Foundation, released a small year-end list. The list named three Americans — not three "famous" Americans, but three working Americans — whose 2017 work the Obama Foundation wanted to publicly recognize. Jahkil Jackson, age 10, of Chicago, Illinois, was on the list.
Obama tweeted the photo of Jahkil from Jahkil's own Project I Am website. The caption was straightforward. "This is Jahkil Jackson. He's 10 years old. He's from Chicago. He's been handing out 'Blessing Bags' to people experiencing homelessness in his city since he was eight. He is exactly the kind of young person who gives me hope for the future of our country. Read about him."
The tweet, by the end of the same day, had been retweeted over 180,000 times. Project I Am's small WordPress donations page got, according to Jamiel Jackson, "approximately ten thousand visitors in the first forty-eight hours, of whom about three thousand donated." By the end of November 2017, Project I Am had raised more money in one week — about $95,000 — than it had raised in its entire previous three years combined.
The Obama Foundation Summit Meeting
Approximately three weeks after the tweet, Jahkil Jackson was invited — along with his parents — to attend the Obama Foundation Summit in Chicago. He met Barack Obama in person on a Tuesday afternoon in late November 2017. Obama, in front of a small audience of summit attendees, knelt down on one knee so that he was at Jahkil's height, shook Jahkil's hand, and said something to him quietly that Jahkil has, in every subsequent interview, declined to share in detail. The photograph of the moment — President Obama on one knee, ten-year-old Jahkil Jackson smiling, Na-Tae' Jackson visibly crying in the background — is the photograph that Jahkil has kept framed on the wall of his bedroom for the last nine years.
2018-2020: Marvel, Disney+, and Crossing the Ocean
The years between Jahkil's eleventh and fourteenth birthdays — the years from the Obama Foundation tweet to the early COVID pandemic — were the years in which Project I Am quietly stopped being a Chicago story and started becoming an international one.
November 2019: Disney+ Marvel's Hero Project
In November 2019, the Walt Disney Company launched its new streaming service, Disney+, along with several original series. One of them was a documentary series called Marvel's Hero Project, which profiled young Americans whose volunteer work made them, in Marvel's framing, "real-life superheroes." The third episode of Season 1, broadcast on December 13, 2019, was titled "Make Way for Jahkil". It ran approximately 25 minutes. It documented, with the small careful intimacy of a well-produced documentary, an average Saturday in the life of 12-year-old Jahkil Jackson — packing Blessing Bags in the family's South Side apartment with approximately twenty volunteer friends, distributing them across downtown Chicago, and then sitting down to have a slice of pizza afterward with his mother.
Marvel donated $10,000 to Chicago Hopes for Kids — a Chicago-area children's-services organization that Jahkil had named as his preferred recipient — in conjunction with the episode's release.
Ghana, Swaziland, Guatemala
Between 2018 and early 2020 — financed largely by the Obama-tweet windfall and by ongoing corporate donations from Nike, Crate & Barrel, and the NBA — Jahkil Jackson made his first international trips. He went to Ghana in the summer of 2018, distributing Blessing Bags to children in two orphanages outside Accra. He went to Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) in the autumn of 2019. He went to Guatemala in March 2019, in the aftermath of the Volcán de Fuego eruption that had killed approximately 200 people the previous summer, distributing bags to displaced families in the temporary shelters that the Guatemalan government had set up outside Antigua.
The internationalization of Project I Am, by Na-Tae' Jackson's subsequent description in a GoFundMe podcast interview, "changed something in Jahkil that we have never quite been able to put into words". "He came back from Ghana different," Na-Tae' said. "He had understood, suddenly, that the homelessness in Chicago was connected to something much bigger than just Chicago. He understood that the kind of work he was doing was the kind of work people had been quietly doing all over the world, for all of human history."
what Jahkil said in Ghana
In an interview with a Ghanaian local news station, recorded in July 2018 at an orphanage outside Accra, 11-year-old Jahkil Jackson — wearing a small white linen shirt his grandmother had bought him for the trip — was asked, in front of a group of approximately forty Ghanaian children, what he wanted them to remember about him after he flew back to America. He thought about the question for about ten seconds. Then he said: "That I came. That I am the same as you. That when you are older, you can do for somebody else what I tried to do for you. And that you don't have to wait until you are an adult to start."
2020-2023: The Pandemic Pivot and Three Best-Selling Books
The COVID-19 pandemic, which began in earnest in the United States in March 2020, presented Project I Am with the same logistical problem it presented to every other in-person volunteer organization. The standard Saturday model — gather friends, pack bags, drive into Chicago, hand them out — was no longer safely possible.
The Virtual Packing Parties
The solution Jahkil and his parents developed in the spring of 2020 was, in its small careful way, a quiet innovation. They moved the packing process onto Zoom. Jahkil — by then 13 years old, in eighth grade, doing his own schoolwork remotely like every other Chicago kid — set up a series of weekend "Virtual Packing Parties". He would invite, through Project I Am's social media accounts, kids from across the United States to spend two hours on a Saturday morning packing Blessing Bags in their own homes, on camera, simultaneously with him. He would lead the group through the contents list. He would tell stories about distributing bags in Chicago. At the end of two hours, the participating kids would mail their packed bags — or drop them off, in the case of Chicago participants — at one of approximately forty Project I Am collection points around the country.
The single largest virtual packing party Jahkil hosted, in October 2020, included 150 kids from 65 different American cities. They packed 5,000 Blessing Bags in one hour.
Three Books
Between 2019 and 2024, Jahkil Jackson — by then in middle school and then high school — wrote and published three books. "I Am" (2019), his first, was a small picture-book-style autobiography aimed at elementary-school readers, written largely in response to a bullying experience Jahkil had had in sixth and seventh grade. "Don't Wait To Be Great" (2021) was a more substantial young-adult book about combining athletics, academics, and community service. "Built Different" (2023) was Jahkil's first book aimed at older teenagers and young adults — a small practical motivational guide structured around the small specific lessons he had learned during the previous decade of running a nonprofit.
All three books became New York Times children's-or-young-adult bestsellers. By the autumn of 2024, when Jahkil was 17, he was — by various measures — one of the youngest three-time bestselling authors in modern American publishing history.
2026: Eighteen Years Old, Six-Foot-Three, and the Tiny Homes Dream
Jahkil Jackson is, as of early 2026, 18 years old. He is a high school senior at Spire Academy, a prep school in Ohio that he attends primarily for its basketball program. He stands 6 feet 3 inches. He is a combo guard. He is currently being recruited by several Division I college programs. He has, in his own subsequent interviews, said that he plans to play college basketball while continuing to run Project I Am — and then, depending on what happens with the college program, possibly pursue a professional basketball career.
The Numbers as of 2026
As of early 2026, Project I Am has — across the eleven years between its founding and Jahkil's eighteenth birthday — accomplished the following measurable things:
The Tiny Homes Dream
The thing Jahkil has been quietly working on, behind the scenes of Project I Am, for several years — the thing he has mentioned in passing in approximately twenty interviews since 2020 but has not yet formally launched — is what he calls "the tiny homes project."
The idea is simple. Jahkil wants, by the time he turns 25, to have raised and deployed enough capital to build a small village of tiny homes — somewhere in Chicago, on a yet-to-be-secured plot of land — that would provide free transitional housing for homeless individuals exiting shelters and trying to rebuild their lives. The total capital required, by his own current estimates, is somewhere in the range of $5 million.
Jahkil has, as of early 2026, raised approximately $420,000 toward this goal, secured three Chicago city-level letters of support, identified two possible plots of land, and is currently in conversation with three nonprofit affordable-housing developers about partnership structures. He has said, in his most recent interview with the Chicago Tribune in December 2025, that he hopes to break ground on the first tiny home before his 21st birthday.
"My personal motto is 'Don't Wait To Be Great.' Just thinking about helping others and wanting to take action is a step in the right direction. You don't have to wait until you're an adult to become a change agent. You can start at five. You can start at eight. You can start today." — Jahkil Jackson, December 2025
Eleven Years in Numbers
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Where is Jahkil Jackson today?
As of early 2026, Jahkil is 18 years old, a 6'3" combo guard, a high school senior at Spire Academy in Ohio (a prep school known for its basketball program), and is being recruited by several Division I college basketball programs. He continues to run Project I Am full-time alongside his academics and athletics. He lives primarily at Spire's residential campus during the school year, returning to Chicago to be with his parents Na-Tae' and Jamiel during holidays and summers.
Q: What is Project I Am?
Project I Am is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded by 8-year-old Jahkil Jackson in January 2015 in Chicago, Illinois. Its core program is the distribution of "Blessing Bags" — small care packages containing toiletries (soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, hand sanitizer, wet wipes), basic essentials (socks, water bottle, granola bars), and seasonal items (hand-warmers in winter, sunscreen in summer) — to people experiencing homelessness.
Q: How did Jahkil start this at age 8?
At his 8th birthday party in January 2015 at a Chicago arcade, Jahkil asked his approximately 15 invited friends to bring toiletries instead of birthday presents. They filled the first 25 Blessing Bags. The next day — a Sunday — Jahkil and his parents drove downtown and Jahkil personally handed each bag to a different person in a doorway. Project I Am was formally incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit a year later.
Q: When did Obama recognize him?
In November 2017, when Jahkil was 10 years old. President Barack Obama, through the Obama Foundation, named Jahkil one of the "three most influential people of 2017." Obama tweeted Jahkil's photo to his then-100-million Twitter followers. Within 48 hours, Project I Am received approximately $95,000 in donations and 10,000 website visitors. Jahkil met Obama in person at the Obama Foundation Summit in Chicago three weeks later.
Q: How many people has Project I Am helped?
As of early 2026, approximately 300,000 people directly, through approximately 75,000 Blessing Bags distributed across 80+ cities and 6 countries (United States, Ghana, Eswatini formerly Swaziland, Guatemala, United Kingdom, India). The organization has raised approximately $1 million in total and has mobilized 3,000+ youth changemakers across 80+ cities globally.
Q: What is the "Pull Over!" rule?
A family rule the Jacksons developed in 2015-2017. The family car always had ~50 Blessing Bags in the trunk. Whenever Jahkil — riding in the backseat — spotted somebody on the sidewalk who might need a bag, he was authorized to call out "Pull Over!" Jamiel (his father) or Na-Tae' (his mother) would pull over when safe. Jahkil would get out, hand the person a bag, and say "Excuse me, ma'am/sir. I made this for you. I hope it helps."
Q: What is the Disney+ Marvel episode about him?
"Make Way for Jahkil" — Season 1, Episode 3 of Marvel's Hero Project, broadcast December 13, 2019 on Disney+. The 25-minute documentary follows 12-year-old Jahkil through an average Saturday packing and distributing Blessing Bags. Marvel donated $10,000 to Chicago Hopes for Kids in conjunction with the episode.
Q: How many books has Jahkil written?
Three, all best-sellers: "I Am" (2019, autobiographical picture book), "Don't Wait To Be Great" (2021, young adult), and "Built Different" (2023, motivational guide for older teens). By age 17, he was one of the youngest three-time bestselling authors in modern American publishing.
Q: What is the tiny homes project?
Jahkil's long-term goal, in development since approximately 2020: to build a small village of tiny homes in Chicago providing free transitional housing for homeless individuals exiting shelters. Total capital needed: approximately $5 million. As of 2026, he has raised ~$420,000, secured 3 Chicago city letters of support, identified 2 possible land plots, and is in active partnership conversations. Goal: break ground before his 21st birthday.
Q: How can I support Project I Am?
Visit officialprojectiam.com to donate ($10 funds one Blessing Bag), purchase Jahkil's books, host your own Blessing Bag packing party (full instructions provided), or volunteer if you're in Chicago/LA/Atlanta. Project I Am is a registered 501(c)(3) — donations are tax-deductible.
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Sources & Further Reading
Primary news coverage:
- WTTW Chicago — 12-Year-Old Jahkil Jackson is Helping the Homeless (December 2019)
- GoFundMe — Meet Jahkil (full interview with parents Na-Tae' and Jamiel)
- Project I Am — Official Website (donate, host packing party, learn more)
- Jahkil.com — Personal website with books, speaking engagements
- YR Media — Chicago Teen Changing the World One Person at a Time
- Authority Magazine — Heroes of the Homeless Crisis: Jahkil Jackson
Featured platforms & honors:
- Disney+ — Marvel's Hero Project, Season 1 Episode 3 "Make Way for Jahkil" (December 2019)
- Obama Foundation — 2017 recognition of three "most influential people"
- CNN Heroes — Young Wonder honor
- BET — 15 Under 15 list
Resources on youth philanthropy & homelessness:
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