We’re excited to share that the Ben Jackson Foundation was featured in the November/December 2024 issue of Madison Locally Sourced. The following, written by Kyle Jacobson, is shared with permission.
Ben Jackson Foundation
by Kyle Jacobson
“Giving meaning to tragedy grants significance to an event beyond the hurt, oftentimes providing an opportunity to help others. It can be a way to keep something alive, like an idea or a moment, or to inspire others. In the case of the Ben Jackson Foundation, it’s a way for Larry Jackson and his family to memorialize their son by helping active-duty members of the United States Armed Forces.
“Ben Jackson Foundation is named after my son,” says Larry. “Ben enlisted in the Air Force in 2016. He graduated from high school in New Glarus, then he went into the Air Force. He went to Texas for basic training and then his follow-on school, and then he got orders to go on to Japan.
“Being in Japan, it’s like a 14-hour time difference, and it was hard to find time to talk when we were both awake. I think when he first got there, he was a bit homesick, but he found his groove. I think he ended up being there from March of 2017 to a little over a year. One day, he messaged me and was like, ‘Hey, I’d like to come home and surprise everybody and see the family and see my friends. Could you help me out with a ticket?’ A ticket from Japan was a couple thousand dollars. At that point, it’s more or less what he made in a whole month.”
Larry and Ben planned it out perfectly. As Larry was out of Wisconsin for work, the two met up at a connecting flight in Detroit, and for the next week, everyone was together. Larry remembers the experience fondly, thankful for how fortunate they were to have that time. Ben shared that his friends back at base were jealous because, though they could get the time off, they couldn’t afford the ticket home.
“About six weeks after that, the Air Force came to the door and said he died in an accident on base. It was a motorcycle accident. … We went through the whole funeral and everything. The Air Force flew us out to Japan for a memorial service. A lot of people had given money to his memorials, so we really didn’t know what to do with it. We went through a few different ideas talking as a family, but none of the ideas we came up with really felt like it was clearly the right thing. Then my youngest son said, ‘Ben got to come home for a visit and see family right before he died. You should help other people do that.’ That seemed like the perfect thing to do.”
And that’s what the Ben Jackson Foundation has been doing since it gained nonprofit status, in December 2018. As of this writing, the Foundation has given out 650 tickets totaling over $500,000. But much of that success only started happening in May 2021.
Originally, Larry envisioned the money being used as sort of a scholarship. As he sees it, young adults going on from high school to the military aren’t given much of a sendoff, so this could be a great way to award individuals joining the Armed Forces. The thing about high schoolers is they’re generally more interested in leaving home, not so much when they’ll be coming back.
Larry recalls going to Janesville to meet with those who would soon be going to basic training. Before those students graduated, they met once a month on a Saturday for a program designed to prep them for the transition. He told the 20 or so students to pull out their cell phones to complete a five-minute application so they could have their plane ticket home paid for. Everyone pulled out their phones, but of the 20 students, only 1 completed the application.
“We then started talking about pivoting to talking to active duty. If we can get them after they’re in the military, once the reality hits, once they’ve been away from home, once they’ve seen how expensive flights are and how little they’re actually making, it’ll be a different mindset.
“We had some contacts that we knew through Ben and met after Ben’s death at the Air Force. We sent out emails to three bases and said, ‘Hey, if you’d know anybody that could benefit from this, please forward this information to a few people.’ Within a couple weeks of that, those emails got forwarded all over the world, literally. In May of 2021, we got 2,000 applications.”
One of the biggest surprises to Larry when he started the Foundation was discovering that no other organization was doing what he wanted to do. A lot of people he’s run into work under the assumption that the military pays for active-duty personnel to return home, which is why the Foundation targets the lowest paid members of the Armed Forces—typically those who’ve been in four years or less.
Exciting and rewarding as the work is, all this relatively recent success has come with an unforeseen burden for Larry and those running the Foundation. “People think, and I thought this too early on, that it’s very cool to be able to help people like this and send people home. The reality, though, when you’re reading through the applications, it’s gut-wrenching knowing that you have to say no to most of them. If you have to choose between the person that wants to go home and see their grandfather in hospice or go home and attend the funeral of their dad or be at their sister’s wedding, who are you going to say no to? … It’s tough to know you can’t say yes to everybody, and pretty much everyone is deserving.”
Currently, the number of applicants has settled from over 300 a month to around 80, with only 15 receiving the money for a ticket home. It would be a dream for Larry to say yes to every applicant, which is why the Foundation tries to make it as easy as possible to donate. “Even if somebody were to donate $10 a month, you get enough of them coming in, and it makes a difference. If you get four of your friends to do the same, that brings somebody home every year.”
The Ben Jackson Foundation is about bringing families together for a moment that otherwise wouldn’t be granted and remembering a son whose family has found a way for him to keep giving back. To learn more about Ben, the organization, or to donate, visit benjacksonfoundation.org.”
You can view the Madison Locally Sourced issue online, or download a PDF of our article.
