In 1976, Bill Sample, a police
officer from Philadelphia who was assigned on protective duty at a children’s
hospital, deeply affected by the hardships the patients were facing everyday,
decided to help make the dreams and wishes of the terminally and chronically
ill children come true. He founded the Sunshine Foundation, the first among
many wish-granting charities we know of today. The foundation’s goal is to
grant the wishes of children between the ages of three to eighteen, who suffer
from chronic, serious or terminal illness, as well as the physically challenged
and the abused, and whose families cannot afford to grant those wishes
themselves.
Through the years, the Sunshine
Foundation has grown and has been able to build the Dream Village in Florida where the children and their
families could stay to get away from it all, even for a little while. Through
the years, the Sunshine Foundation has been able to answer 36,000 little dreams
and counting and has become one of America’s most respected foundations.