BALTIMORE (WJZ) — Dozens of Baltimore area Chick-fil-A restaurants are once again teaming up with the Casey Cares Foundation to help critically ill children.
On Thursday, 38 Baltimore-area locations will take part in the third-annual Pajama Day. Customers can drop off a new pair of pajamas between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. in exchange for a digital offer card for a free chicken sandwich. The program runs online through Tuesday.
Those pajamas will then go to children who are facing extended hospital stays.
“It’s really important for us to give back to the very the community that we’re serving within,” Chick-fil-A area marketing director Lisa Scott Dzwonczyk said.
For the past 20 years, the Baltimore-based Casey Cares Foundation has been providing ongoing support and programs for critically ill children like Taylor Thomas who was born with spina bifida.
“Spina bifida is when your spine don’t go all the way up,” he explained.
The programming also benefits the childrens’ families. It ranges from sporting events to a movie night.
“Really any normal kind of activity that we can provide for the family that gives them some quality family time, some positive memories,” Erin Ritter, the nonprofit’s deputy associate director, said.
The gestures bring a sense of normalcy to families whose children are battling a number of diseases.
“Without them and what they do, I don’t know if my family would have experienced the simple joys that my kids would probably have missed out on,” Thomas’ mother Nickell said.
Even something as simple as pajamas can mean the world to those families, she added.
“Something so small as pajamas, it changes that child’s outlook of where they’re at. It makes them forget they’re in a hospital,” she said.
To learn more about how to take part, click here.