Youth Group’s Donation

Should Help Brady’s Smile Widen

Newtown Congregational Church’s Senior High Youth Group donated $500 to Brady’s Smile on December 6.

The youth picked the charity organization, designed T-shirts that incorporated the Brady’s Smile logo and were sold as fundraisers to members of the church, and hosted two T-Shirt Nights at My Place Restaurant (where members of the church were encouraged to proudly wear their shirts). My Place Restaurant generously donated a percentage of their sales made during the T-Shirt Night events.

Members of the youth group presented the check to Annie Hinton, co-founder of the group, during their worship service.

Brady’s Smile, Inc was created by Annie and Matt Hinton in memory of their son Brady, who died at the age of 2 of medical issues that affected every major system in his body. The Fairfield-based charitable organization has a mission of promoting, improving, protecting, and sustaining the health, emotional well-being, and social development of children in need, including children suffering from illness or disability, children at risk, and underserved children.

The current goal of Brady’s Smile is to make life easier for two special groups: children in the newborn and pediatric intensive care hospital units, and chronically ill and disabled children at home.

The group has four hospital-based programs across 11 hospitals in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. It is also in the process of creating two home-based programs focused on assisting families with the ongoing medical and therapeutic care of their children.

They provide Comfort Bags, which are filled with basic items that families may need when they are living their life in an intensive care unit (bottles of water, small snacks, toiletries, writing materials, playing cards, puzzle books, stickers, crayons, small toys, and Subway gift cards); homemade fleece blankets to babies and children in intensive care units; music for the babies and children by providing crib-side CD players, regular CD players, and soothing CDs; and monthly homemade meals to the parents, families, and caregivers of newborns and children in the ICU.