For this boy, who has autism and experiences sensory-processing challenges, the unfamiliar environment could be especially overwhelming. So the grownups mustered the police and rallied the fire department, deployed a drone, and released the dogs, all of them scouring the dense local woods.
Sergeant JT Mann of the Prince George County police department was one of the searchers who found the boy. When he came home that evening, he told his wife and two sons what had happened. They would understand better than most, he knew, because the younger of his two children—Ledger, 9—also has autism. Ledger heard the story and sympathized with what the lost boy must have experienced.
Ledger stands with the flight crew of HCA Virginia’s Air Care Eagle emergency medical helicopter in Hopewell, VA, holding a bag he presented to the crew for the helicopter on Nov. 4, 2025. —Courtesy of the Mann family
Ledger—whose work has earned him recognition as TIME’s Kid of the Year for 2026 and as a TIME for Kids Service Star, our sister publication’s program highlighting young people making a positive impact—approved of the way his father had coaxed the boy out of the cabinet, playing a video on a smartphone to catch his eye and ease his fear. But he also believed that wasn’t enough.
“Dad,” he said straightforwardly, “you don’t have those things.”
“He came up with that whole concept in a span of 10 minutes,” says Ledger’s mother Amanda, the elected commonwealth’s attorney for Dinwiddie County, Virginia.
Money to support Ledger’s idea started almost immediately, with a round of funding from a very fitting source: Ledger’s piggy bank. As it happened, there was ample cash on hand.
“We reached out to civic centers—the Moose Lodge, the Fraternal Order of the Police, churches—who donated money toward purchasing the bag and the stuff that goes in it,” says JT. “Nothing in the bag is expensive. Everything is from the Dollar Tree or Dollar General. They’re not $100 headsets. They’re $5 headsets.”
“He’s very particular about how the bag has to be made,” says JT. “He has an assembly line and everything has to be done perfectly.”
“If the fire department’s on one side of the county, our police officer [in the vicinity] wouldn’t have to go all the way back to the police station,” says JT. “The bags are located so that the police officer could pick one up at that fire station.”
Ledger and his father JT, a sergeant with the Prince George County police department. —Matt Eich for TIME“We had one individual fly out from Texas,” says JT. “She flew all the way [to Virginia to deliver] bags from her company. She visited our police department over one weekend to meet Ledger because he was such an inspiration to her.”
Ledger the public servant is, of course, still Ledger the kid, with schoolwork and hobbies very much a part of his life. Until this year, he attended a Dinwiddie public school, but, according to his mom, the kind of specialized attention he needs as he’s grown older requires a smaller environment. Now he is one of 10 children attending a private school known as the Learning to Lead Academy. His favorite subject is math; his favorite hobby is Lego; his favorite position in football is on the offensive line. But the day before speaking to TIME, he played defense—and even recorded a quarter-back sack.
With each bag the family distrib-utes, they discover something new about what kids in distress need for comfort. Children get to keep any item they select from a bag, while the bag and its remaining contents go back to the first responders, who replace the missing items. Far and away the comfort items in greatest demand are the plush animals. Ledger himself has a mountain of them.
During weekends or when Ledger is on school vacation, the family visits the towns and counties that have requested the bags, deliver-ing completed ones and helping to assemble others on-site.
The only participating locale the family hasn’t visited in person is Ulster County, New York, which committed itself to assembling 100 bags. Instead, the county and the family -arranged a Zoom conversation so that Ledger could explain how the bags should be assembled. As he had been with the other jurisdictions the family worked with, Ledger was all business, keeping a close eye on how the bags were packed. “One place was doing it out of order,” JT says. “He was not a fan of that.”
Ledger’s passion and attention to detail continue to fuel the project—one that the family hopes to take nationwide.
“I want to have this go everywhere,” says Ledger. “To all of America!”
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