Chick-Fil-A Peach Bowl scores big with charities, boosting cancer research with $20M donation

ATLANTA — As Indiana and Oregon battle in the Chick-Fil-A Peach Bowl, off the field, Peach Bowl president and CEO Gary Stokan said the game generates sweet success. 

“We expect a sellout crowd, an unbelievable and enthusiastic crowd in Mercedes-Benz Stadium,” Stokan said. “We’ll have over $100 million in economic impact. But the real number is about $6 million goes back into city and state coffers.” 

Stokan touts the Peach Bowl as the most charitable college football bowl game. The Peach Bowl has donated over $80 million to more than a dozen charities, including the LegACy Fund, which aims to find new treatments and cures for childhood cancer. Dr. Doug Graham leads the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorder Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, which is the primary center for all children diagnosed with cancer and blood diseases within the city of Atlanta.

“We also care for 75-percent of the children with cancer and blood diseases throughout the state of Georgia,” Graham said. “Currently, the overall survival rate is 80-percent, yet we still have 20-percent of the kids who don’t have curative therapies and we also have toxicities in the current treatments we have, so there’s a great need to have better treatments that are less toxic and have this gap we need to hit on the 20-percent of the kids we currently can’t cure.” 

To help fill that gap, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta partnered with the Peach Bowl, which made a $20 million investment to launch 18 new clinical trials in the last five years and treat more than 70 children. The spark for the investment was six-year-old Anna Charles. The daughter of a Peach Bowl executive died just five months after doctors diagnosed her with an aggressive form of leukemia. Her name lives on in the Peach Bowl LegACy Fund.

“They took a tragedy in a young child diagnosed with cancer, and they turned it into hope, hope for many children newly diagnosed with cancer,” Graham said. “We want to continue to find ways that someday we’ll have a curative option for every child diagnosed with cancer.”

As Stokan prepares to step down after this season, he believes new Peach Bowl leadership will step up to try and sack cancer and continue scoring wins for charities. Current Peach Bowl COO David Epps will eventually take charge.

The Peach Bowl continues to give back through blood donation drives, scholarships for Title I students and children’s medical research.

“I wanted to make sure the foundation we built, we’re able to take it to another level,” Stokan said. “It’s been part of our mission to maintain that charity contribution model, and we do so willingly and happily to be able to use college football for the greater good.”