How Jamila Sams Built a Social-Emotional Curriculum That Actually Resonates

August 28, 2025 4

Before Jamila Sams built her award-winning education platform, We Do It 4 the Culture, she was behind the lens capturing hip-hop’s early digital rise. In the late ’90s, she freelanced as a photographer for Okayplayer during its message board heyday, even getting shoutouts from Questlove. “I used to intern with Annie Leibovitz in New York City, and I remember helping to edit some of the photographs from when she shot The Roots for Vanity Fair,” Sams said. “Even though Amir and Tariq were part of The Roots, they were still in the message boards. I have very deep roots [here] — no pun intended.”

Raised in West Philadelphia, Sams grew up steeped in culture and structure. Her father, a Harlem native, ran What’s Happening Now, a store on 48th and Spruce in Philly that sold fat shoelaces, spike bracelets, and snacks. “But it was less about kids coming to get penny candy and water ice than it was for them to see a Black male entrepreneur in their neighborhood,” she said. Sams, just 8 years old, often worked in the store and absorbed those conversations. “My dad kind of used hip-hop culture as a conduit to build connections with young people.”

Education was the cornerstone at home. “We weren’t allowed to watch television Monday through Thursday. The only thing that we could watch was The Cosby Show and A Different World on Thursday nights,” she recalled. “My homework had to be on the kitchen table every single night so that it could be checked. And if it wasn’t neat, my dad would wake me up, write it over.”

Inspired by the idea-driven world of ad pitches in the 1992 film Boomerang, Sams originally set her sights on marketing. “I didn’t know what that was. Now that I’m an adult, I know that was actually being a creative director.” But after discovering that Lincoln University’s marketing program required calculus, she switched her major to education. “They didn’t do calculus in Boomerang,” laughed Jamila.

She began teaching third grade and “looped,” following her students to the end of grade school. “So I was the same teacher third through fifth,” she explained. Later, she moved into workforce development and served as a middle school assistant principal. Across every role, her approach remained: build connection through what students care about.

In 2020, that idea became We Do It 4 the Culture. “We meet students where they are. So if they’re spending their time on YouTube, then we curate content from YouTube and then we line that content up with the five social emotional learning competencies,” she explained. “If you just sit students down in a circle and say, ‘Hey, let’s talk about time management,’ they’re going to roll their eyes. But if we’re doing it through the lens of this story by Tyler, the Creator, they’re more likely to open up.”

Now, We Do It 4 the Culture is in over 150 schools — including full district contracts in Philadelphia, Portland, and more than 30 across New York City. “We’re the only Black-owned social emotional learning curriculum that’s focused on hip-hop culture and storytelling that’s securing district contracts.”

Her mission is simple: “Make education feel like it belongs to the students again.” And she’s doing just that — on their terms, in their language.

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