There is a raccoon in Seattle who is shaped like a dinner roll. 🦝
His name is Jimothy. He lives in Ballard, a northwest neighbourhood of Seattle, where he goes about his business raiding whatever a raccoon raids and turning up on people’s backyard cameras. He is wild, he is healthy, and he is — through absolutely no fault or effort of his own — very nearly spherical.
Over about three weeks this summer, that roundness raised more than $58,000 for a food bank. Nobody, least of all Jimothy, planned this.
First, the shape
Jimothy has what’s described online as a short spine — a congenital condition where the vertebrae are compressed, so the torso ends up dramatically shortened. The practical result is a raccoon with almost no visible neck, hunched forward, front and back ends pulled close together. He looks, and there’s no gentler way to put it, like someone gently squished a normal raccoon from both ends.
The important part, and the part everyone in Ballard is careful to lead with: he’s fine. He is not sick, not overweight, not injured, not in need of rescuing. He’s a wild raccoon who moves around his neighbourhood, climbs what he wants to climb, eats what he wants to eat, and is very hard to find on purpose. He’s just built differently, and he has clearly never once thought about it.
“It looks like he was squished up, hunched over,” one Ballard resident told FOX 13 Seattle.
That’s it. That’s the whole medical situation. A slightly compressed raccoon, living his life.
The internet, predictably, lost it
In mid-July a neighbour filmed him waddling through a yard and put it on Instagram. Millions of views later, Ballard residents were scrolling back through their own security-camera footage hoping for a glimpse, and Jimothy had gone properly, internationally viral.
What followed was the modern honour guard for a beloved animal. Someone gave him a Google search animation. World of Warcraft added a Jimothy NPC. A fan wrote him a Dungeons & Dragons stat block — filed, magnificently, as Jimothy, Beloved Cryptid. The Seattle Mariners put him on the big screen during their salmon run, and the whole stadium cheered like a celebrity had walked in. Somebody painted a mural of him on a corner in Ballard, outside a pottery studio, deliberately positioned so he peeks out from behind a garbage can — which the studio’s owner correctly identified as “the most appropriate place for a raccoon to be.”
“He’s different, he’s a little bit weird, a little bit funky,” she said. “He’s a lot like Ballard.”
Then somebody painted him, and it got serious
Ryan Henry Ward is a Seattle muralist whose bright, big-eyed animals are all over the region — on buildings, fences, garage doors, the occasional Sasquatch. He signs his work Henry. On 18 July he posted a photo of a 24-by-24-inch acrylic painting of Jimothy with a caption that turned the whole thing from a meme into a fundraiser:
“Jimothy. The hero we needed. I’ve decided to give 100% of the money made from this painting to Ballard Food Bank, a place that helped me through some of my hardest times.”
He ran the auction the way you’d run a garage sale — bids in the comments, highest one wins. The winner was a local named Angela Galdabini, at a beautifully silly $6,543.21. Ward donated the money within 24 hours and posted the receipt, because of course he did.
And that, reasonably, should have been the end of a very nice story.
Instead: the dominoes
Amazon matched the winning bid — and then, crucially, tagged other Pacific Northwest companies and effectively dared them to follow.
They followed. One by one, in public, in the replies:
- T-Mobile: “We could never turn down supporting Jimothy and the Ballard Food Bank! Count us in!”
- Starbucks: “Count us in on supporting Ballard Food Bank with a donation match!”
- Alaska Airlines: “We can’t issue Jimothy a boarding pass, but we’re always happy to support our community.”
- The Seattle Mariners: “Sounds like a home run!”
- Plus Brooks, Stanley, Microsoft, and the Seattle Kraken.
You can practically hear the meetings. Somewhere in eight or nine corporate communications teams, someone looked at the raccoon, looked at their manager, and said: …fine. The raccoon wins.
Where the money actually goes
This is the part that matters, and it’s not abstract.
Ballard Food Bank has been feeding this corner of Seattle since the 1970s. It doesn’t hand out pre-packed boxes; it runs a grocery-store model, where neighbours walk in and shop for free — produce, canned goods, hygiene supplies, pet food. It serves over 10,500 households a month, and its Kindness Café puts out an average of 1,000 freshly prepared meals a day. It also helps with rent and utilities, which is often the thing that keeps somebody housed.
The food bank’s communications manager, Gypsy Walukones, mentioned something lovely while confirming the totals: most of the donations coming in weren’t from the big names at all. They were from individuals — including people who’d bid on the painting, knew they wouldn’t win, and sent money anyway.
“One thing I love about the Ballard Food Bank community is the way we really are all in this together,” she said. “So many of our neighbours might come in for food one week and bring in a few dollars to donate the next, or volunteer here regularly, or pick up trash in the neighbourhood. It takes all of us!”
She also noted, with what we can only assume was a straight face, that Ballard Food Bank is about human — “and yes, animal” — connections.
Why this is on a good-news blog
Because the causal chain here is completely absurd and completely real.
A raccoon was born with a slightly short spine. He grew up round. Somebody filmed him. The internet decided, collectively and without a meeting, that it loved him. An artist who had once needed the food bank himself painted the raccoon and gave every cent to that food bank. A stranger paid six and a half thousand dollars for the painting. The largest companies in the region then queued up in public to match her — not because a campaign asked them to, but because a raccoon was watching.
And at the end of it, in a real building in Ballard, actual people are pushing carts through actual aisles and taking home actual carrots.
Jimothy, for his part, has no idea. He is out there tonight, low to the ground, absolutely spherical, doing raccoon things in a neighbourhood that adores him. The world does this sometimes: it finds one small, odd, entirely blameless creature, and decides to be enormously kind in his name. 🦝💛
Know a story where something small set off something wonderfully large? Sign the guestbook and tell us.
