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Jamal Helps Kids with Sneakers and Dreams

Jamal Burger is the face behind @jayscale, Jamal’s extremely popular Instagram account featuring his stunning black and white photography. He has become known for his work in sports photography, and has an incredible gift of capturing raw emotion from a single moment. Through his work, Jamal created a program called The Kickback which started out as a way to give kids sneakers, but has now morphed into a mentorship program that aims to show kids that their dreams are limitless.

To help kids realize their dreams, Jamal asks a series of questions. “What do you like to do? What are you interested in? What strikes your curiosity? And what are you really good at/what do you enjoy/what just comes natural to you?” From there, Jamal leaves them to think about those things and then he tries to help them paint random scenarios to identify what they like to do and empower them to do that. “We’re really just trying to empower the kids in the sense with giving them the ideas to understand that if they take all these ingredients and make their own recipe, it can really become something if they want to make it that.”

He goes on to mention, “We just want to instill the concept of making an impact … In reality, the cool thing—the thing that will last and resonate—is when you change someone’s life or change someone’s perspective.”

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