MSU Home Coming 2022

Laughs With Legends was humbled to honor Joan Jackson Johnson.

Known by the nickname “Triple J,” Jackson Johnson worked tirelessly to address food and housing insecurity in Greater Lansing. A city employee for about 15 years, she focused on feeding and housing people in need both in and outside of the office.

A licensed psychologist, Jackson Johnson volunteered for decades with area nonprofits. On the weekends, she could be found driving around the city making sure nobody was sleeping on the streets.

“The end of last year, we still had over 5,000 homeless people in Lansing,” Jackson Johnson told the State Journal in 2017. “And so are we failing as a community? Do we fail families where they lose subsidized housing? When we allow a family to be put out of a house where they are paying $10 a month for four bedrooms, the system has failed those kids, the system has failed the family.”

Born in Jacksonville, Florida, and raised in Tampa, Jackson Johnson moved to Michigan in 1970 to study rehabilitation counseling and psychology at Michigan State University.

She met her husband during her first year in the area. They would go on to raise five children.

After finishing her Ph.D., Jackson Johnson worked as a psychologist, opening a practice in East Lansing. While running that practice, she survived a battle with ovarian cancer.

In 2006, former Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero, with whom Jackson Johnson had served on the area’s Community Mental Health board, asked her to take a job with the city.

Despite the lesser pay, she accepted, seeing an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of her neighbors.

“God spared my life of cancer, and I just felt that I was called to do something more than a cushy private practice,” she said in 2017. “I saw quite a few people who couldn’t afford to pay, but I saw people who could and had a decent life.”

Bernero gave Jackson Johnson his trust, allowing her to do what she felt called to do “and ask for forgiveness later,” she said in 2017.

“I like solving problems,” she said. “I like to be a part of the solution rather than the problem itself.”

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