When the Minnesota Vikings signed Harrison Phillips as a free agent in March 2022, they thought he was kidding when he asked for a desk in their community relations department. But Phillips was serious, given his ambition to serve people in Minnesota with his foundation. It wasn’t the first time that someone thought he was joking around when he was trying to do a good deed.
Phillips says he was in sixth grade when he sat at a table with his special education classmates, teachers, and educators. He had been finishing up a project, arrived late to lunch, and the tables full of football players and wrestlers had no empty seats. So he found room next to his special ed classmates.
“The principal came over, and the assistant principal came over. They thought I was gonna like do a joke or do something rude,” he said, “but I was just sitting down wanting to meet some new people and make some new friends, and some of those guys are still good friends of mine to this day.”
Phillips said that he felt compelled by his Christian upbringing to stand up for kids whom bullies picked on while he was growing up in Omaha. “It was instilled in me pretty early on through my faith,” he said. “It’s a really similar moral and character that the Bible teaches all of us, and it just was like another second nature. I was always a big kid, so there’s always kinda some leadership roles on me.
“I always stood up to bullying when we were younger in elementary school and middle school and tried to find the lost sheep, so to speak.”
Phillips’ philanthropy began in childhood and has manifested in his foundation today. On Monday, the Minnesota Vikings held a surprise event announcing that they had nominated him for the Walter Payton Man of the Year Award. The NFL considers it their most prestigious award, recognizing players whose impact extends beyond the game and has led them to leave positive legacies in their communities. It was Phillips’ third nomination. His former team, the Buffalo Bills, nominated him in 2020 and 2021.
Harrison’s Playmakers – named after his foundation that coaches and mentors kids with social, physical, and economic challenges – stunned him at the event. “I was completely surprised,” he said. “I was coming off the bye week, big old beard, ratty hair. I didn’t even have shoes on. I had some flip-flops from the car.”
He said the most surprising thing about it is that none of his Facebook friends, nor anyone with his number, alerted him.
I arrived, and I was on the phone with a buddy, so I wasn’t really seeing who was like walking in the building and stuff, I was waiting for my wife to arrive. And then we went inside, and I was still clueless. We went upstairs, and I was fighting back tears because, again, like I mentioned to you guys before, any time that someone says something positive to me or graces awareness to me, it’s really easy for me to deflect that at a macro level to my charity and the organizations that I’m working with. But I was so overwhelmed that was like the first real time that it hit me how much they were caring about me and how much I was celebrated.
Philips grew up in a family that ran a daycare for children with disabilities, and he specializes in working with children and adults with Down’s syndrome. “We have an older population,” he said. “There’s not a lot of programs for individuals after the age of 18 or 20. Society says, ‘Oh, it’s not cute anymore.’ The little boy with Down’s syndrome, he’s not cute anymore. There’s not a lot of programs for that. So, I have Playmakers in their mid-50s. And yeah, we wanted to just keep fighting that negative perception out there that people deal with.”
Phillips has worked with other populations, but he feels he has found a philanthropic niche.
When I got to the NFL, I realized in Buffalo that there were a lot of teammates of mine who were already trying to tackle this. And when I would go speak to a classroom in the inner city and share my story and try to preach the importance of education and literacy skills and character values that I’d hope to see in our public school system, I realized that they didn’t see themselves in me, so the message was sometimes blurred, when maybe another one of my teammates who looked similar and had a similar background from them, other than Omaha, Nebraska and Stanford, and I realize that they were kinda hitting that niche community already, and that was something that was kinda being checked off.
In one particular case, Phillips’ effort was life-saving.
I had a mother tell me that she thought her son was gonna kill himself. He had tried to commit suicide once before, and as he was introduced to Harrison’s Playmakers, [he had a] complete shift of mindset and optimism and had something to look forward to, the 10 to 12 events that you do a year, and to her, to be teary eyed, telling me that she thinks that our organization saved her kid’s life, that was really powerful.
The league considers how many times a player’s team has nominated him when deciding who will win the award. They want to see consistent effort and impact in the community. Whether he gets the award or not, Phillips says he never set out to win it. It’s something that is the product of the impact he made. Something that has come second nature to him since he was in middle school.
