Operation Dreamlift: Magic Happens Today

(Editor’s Note: A Patch reporter is accompanying the group to Florida to document the day with news, photos and videos.)

Something truly magical is going to happen today.

Today (May 3) the wishes of more than 100 children with special needs from Mercer County and the surrounding area are going to come true. They are going to board a plane and fly to Florida to spend the day having fun in the sun with Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and all their pals at Walt Disney World Resort’s Magic Kingdom.

The all-expenses-paid trip – appropriately named “Operation Dreamlift” – is courtesy of the Mercer County Chapter of the Sunshine Foundation, a national non-profit organization that was founded in 1976 by Philadelphia Police Officer Bill Sample. The foundation currently has more than a dozen chapters in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Florida and Colorado.

Organized, in part, by police officers from Lawrence and Ewing townships, with Sample’s help, the Mercer County Chapter of the Sunshine Foundation has been sending a plane-full of special-needs children to Disney each year for more than two decades.

This year 106 special-needs children – up to the age of 18 – will make the trip, accompanied by 67 chaperones. After attending an early-morning send-off celebration at the National Guard facility at Trenton-Mercer Airport in Ewing, the group will board a chartered Miami Air plane for the flight to Orlando, Fla.

“We give the children all they need to go,” said Cathy DiCostanzo, president of the Mercer County Chapter of the Sunshine Foundation. “We feed them in the morning. We give them a backpack with suntan lotion, cameras, fruit, coloring books, all types of things – everything donated. We also give them spending money for lunch.”

She said the group will likely pass through the entrance gates of the Magic Kingdom around 11:30 a.m. At that point, she said, the children and their chaperones will be free to explore the park and do whatever they want, from meeting ther favorite characters to experiencing the thrills of rides like the Space Mountain rollercoaster.

“We encourage them to go on as many rides as they can. We have people from Disney who put them on the rides without them having to wait in line,” she said.

The group meets back up around 6 p.m. for the ride back to the airport and the return flight to New Jersey.

“We take children with all kinds of special needs,” DiCostanzo said. “Some children have Down syndrome or autism. Some have dystrophies. Some are deaf – we’re taking some children from the [Marie H.] Katzenbach School [for the Deaf]. Some have different kinds of heart problems. Some children have diseases that are too long to pronounce or too hard to explain; the kind of diseases that can really break your heart.”

The children who travel on the Dreamlift are able to sustain the rigors of the trip – “it’s a long day,” DiCostanzo said. Other children who are terminally- or severely-ill are sent throughout the year to the Sunshine Foundation’s Dream Village, a 22-acre “oasis for families to escape hospitals and needles” located about 15 miles outside of Orlando. Children and their families stay at the village for five days and enjoy the local attractions, with all costs paid for by the foundation.  

The Mercer County Chapter of the Sunshine Foundation spends the entire year holding fundraisers to generate the money – estimated at about $165,000 this year – needed to make the Dreamlift happen.

“In the past month we’ve had many donations from many civic groups and organizations like rotary clubs, American Legion posts, PBA locals, you name it. We’re saying each seat is worth $350 – it’s actually more, but we’re happy to get any donation we can get,” DiCostanzo said.     

“The Mercer County community and the surrounding area have been extremely good to us, I believe, because the people that donate to us know that 90 cents of every dollar goes right to the wishes and dreams of the kids. And that’s so important. We’re all volunteers,” she said.

Anyone wishing to do so can send a donation to the Mercer County Chapter of the Sunshine Foundation at P.O. Box 55130, Trenton, N.J. 08638.