A Virginia 9-year-old with autism made bags to calm lost children. TIME named him Kid of the Year

Ledger Mann is 9 and lives in Dinwiddie County, Virginia. His dad, JT, is a police sergeant in Prince George County, next door.

One day JT came home and told Ledger about a call he had been on. A child was lost in the woods. “The kid had autism,” Ledger said.

Ledger knows what that is like. “Because I have autism myself,” he said.

The bags

“He said, let’s create a bag,” his dad remembered. Together they made LGM Bags: clear backpacks filled with things to comfort a child with autism, or any child who has been lost.

By February they had given just over 50 to police, fire crews, paramedics and hospitals around Virginia. Now it is close to 500, in several states. Some went to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office in Florida. In upstate New York, people read about Ledger and made more than 100 bags of their own.

Kid of the Year

Ledger had already been on the cover of TIME’s kids issue. Then the family got the news: TIME had named him its Kid of the Year, and he will be on the cover of its next issue.

“Yeah, I did not expect all this,” Ledger said. “I thought it was just giving a couple of bags, and didn’t know it would go this far.”

His dad hopes the cover shows “that kids on the spectrum can do anything.” Ledger put it his own way: “It doesn’t matter if you have autism, you can still make the bags.”