10 Celebrities Whose Small Start Grew Years Later, Like Willie Nelson’s One-Time Concert That Became Farm Aid

In 1985, family farms across the U.S. were going under by the thousands, and Willie Nelson thought a concert could help. On September 22 that year, he, Neil Young and John Mellencamp played the first Farm Aid at the University of Illinois’ Memorial Stadium in Champaign. It was meant to be a one-time benefit.

It never stopped. Farm Aid kept coming back year after year, and the money went to family farmers: a hotline for farmers in trouble, emergency grants and help selling what they grow. The 40th-anniversary show filled a stadium in Minneapolis in September 2025, and this fall the festival came to Virginia Beach, with Neil Young still on the stage. Over four decades, it has raised tens of millions of dollars for farm families.

“It’s been two weeks since Farm Aid 2026 and we’re still thinking about this one.”

LeBron James grew up in Akron, Ohio, moving from apartment to apartment, and in 2018 he opened a public school there for kids who were already falling behind. The I Promise School opened with 240 third and fourth graders who were already a year or two behind in reading, and it came with things a regular school doesn’t offer: a bike and a helmet for every student, free meals and snacks, and GED classes for their parents.

In its first year, 90% of its students met or beat their growth targets in reading and math. Then the school saw that some families had no stable place to live, so in 2020 the foundation opened I Promise Village, free transitional housing for students’ families. This October, the school celebrated two years of its house system with all five houses in one cheering crowd.

“The house pride was in FULL effect!”

In 2002, Tony Hawk started a foundation with a narrow goal: to help low-income communities build free public skateparks. The first grants were small and went to local groups that had already started raising money for a park of their own.

The idea scaled. The foundation, renamed The Skatepark Project in 2020, has now helped fund nearly 700 public skateparks in all 50 states, with more than $10 million in grants. Every one of them is free to use.

In 2011, Jon Bon Jovi and his wife, Dorothea, opened a restaurant in Red Bank, New Jersey, in a former auto body shop. It had about 33 seats and no prices on the menu. Guests who can pay leave a donation. Guests who can’t pay volunteer instead, and earn their meal by helping in the kitchen or in the community.

Bon Jovi has said it isn’t a soup kitchen. Everyone sits at the same tables and gets the same three-course meal. Fifteen years later, JBJ Soul Kitchen has four locations in New Jersey, including two on college campuses, and has served more than 275,000 meals. This year it received an Impact Award from the James Beard Foundation.

“JBJ Soul Kitchen isn’t your typical restaurant.”

In 1992, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny Hernandez started a youth sports competition in Los Angeles called the Inner-City Games. The point was simple: give kids somewhere to be in the hours after school.

It grew into After-School All-Stars, a national organization that runs free after-school programs: sports, tutoring, cooking, coding and whatever else keeps middle schoolers busy and safe until their parents get home. Schwarzenegger still hosts its annual charity night, and this October it raised $9.75 million in one evening. The organization now serves 150,000 students across the country.

“$9.75 million. Countless possibilities for the next generation.”

At the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Michael Phelps won eight gold medals, which earned him a $1 million bonus from a sponsor. He put all of it into a foundation about water safety and swimming.

Its main program started in 2010 as a pilot with six Boys & Girls Clubs. It’s called “im,” after the individual medley, his signature race, and also as in “I am.” The program has since reached more than 15,000 kids and Special Olympics athletes, and by 2021 it was running at 28 Boys & Girls Clubs across the country.

In 2008, Matthew McConaughey and his wife, Camila, started a foundation named after his best-known line: just keep livin. The plan was free after-school fitness and wellness classes for high school students in big cities.

It started small. By 2019, the foundation had served about 20,000 teens, and in 2022 alone it ran 43 programs in 15 cities for more than 3,000 students. The classes have grown beyond workouts to cooking, nutrition, wellness and community service.

“A look back at some of our #justkeeplivin programs in action during the 2025–2026 school year!”

When “Hamilton” became the hardest ticket on Broadway, Lin-Manuel Miranda and historian Ron Chernow went to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History with an idea: use the show to teach history. The Hamilton Education Program was launched in 2015 for students from low-income schools.

Students study real documents from the founding era, then write their own songs, raps and poems about what they found, and some of them perform their work on the actual “Hamilton” stage before watching the show. The program was designed to reach 250,000 students and later moved online so that schools far from any theater could join.

In 1996, his first full season with the New York Yankees, 21-year-old Derek Jeter started the Turn 2 Foundation with his father. Its first fundraiser, in his hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan, brought in $30,000.

A year later, the foundation launched Jeter’s Leaders, a four-year program for high school students built around good grades, healthy choices and leading by example. Thirty years on, Turn 2 has given more than $48 million to youth programs in Kalamazoo, New York and Florida, and the first Jeter’s Leaders are now old enough to have teenagers of their own.

In 2012, Taylor Swift pledged $4 million to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville to build an education center, the largest gift any individual artist had made to the museum. The Taylor Swift Education Center opened in 2013, a year ahead of schedule, with classrooms where kids write songs with working songwriters.

In 2025, the museum’s education programs reached more than 125,000 people. This year, the center is hosting an exhibition called Connection: posters designed by Nashville public school students and adult artists with developmental disabilities, printed by hand with the museum’s historic letterpress shop. Fourteen years after the pledge, the walls are covered with the kids’ work.