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Our goal is to be the most well-managed and cost-efficient charity in the world. If you have any questions, comments or concerns about any of this data please email our Co-Founder Brian Mullaney directly at bmullaney@smiletrain.org. Thank you.
Program Services
Free Cleft Surgeries
While our cost per surgery varies across the 78 different countries we work in, our contribution per surgery averages about $250. This amount reflects the contribution per surgery that we provide our partner hospitals. They also cover a significant portion of each surgery as part of our cost-sharing agreement.
Free Medical Equipment & Infrastructure Support
For many of our partners, access to operating rooms is their biggest barrier. Many struggle with old and/or poorly working equipment such as anesthesia machines and a lack of equipment and supplies. Smile Train provides financial support that has been used for everything from building new operating rooms to crucial safety equipment like pulse oximeters down to cleft surgical instruments and supplies like scalpels and sutures. All of these investments make not only significant number of incremental surgeries possible, but also make these surgeries safer and of higher quality.
Free Ancillary Treatment
Every child with cleft needs more than just surgery. They also need dental care, orthodontics and speech therapy. Where these services are available, we do everything we can to make them available to our patients. We pay for speech therapy sessions, dental and orthodontic work and much more.
Financial Aid For Poor Patients
Some of our patients are so malnourished they are not healthy enough to be operated on and we have to feed them for a week or two before surgery. Some of our patients are so poor they have no money to get home after surgery. Sometimes they have no shoes and no money for food. We have special programs that give small stipends for these poorest of the poor.
Free Training & Education
The Smile Train provides more free training and education to cleft surgeons and related medical professionals than any other organization in the world. Over the past 10 years we have trained more than 60,000 cleft surgeons and related medical professionals from 140+ countries.
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Public Awareness Campaigns in Developing Countries and the United States
Every year, thousands of peasants in developing countries kill or abandon their newborn babies because they don’t know a cleft is a simple birth defect and not a curse from God. Hundreds of thousands of these children with cleft are never brought to hospitals for treatment because their parents don’t know clefts can be fixed. Thousands of Americans come to The Smile Train for information on how to find a good cleft team and how to take care of their newborn baby with a cleft.
Through websites, newspapers, radio, TV, public service announcements, documentaries, public relations, etc., we do more to raise public awareness about clefts both in developing countries and in the United States than any other organization in the world.
More than 2 million Americans watched our Oscar®-winning documentary, Smile Pinki, on HBO and it was broadcast to 900 million people in India. Over the past 10 years, our public awareness efforts reached more than one billion people.
Fundraising
The Smile Train has consistently met all standards of watchdog agencies and the Better Business Bureau and we run some of the most cost-efficient fundraising campaigns in America. We continuously strive to operate more efficiently and to minimize fundraising and administrative costs.
Support from individuals like you is essential as we receive no money from the U.S. Government and very little from corporations and foundations.
Management & General
This number is extremely low for a number of reasons:
1. We have a very small staff of just 42 people worldwide including 25 people in the United States and 17 people around the world. Almost all of our regional managers in developing countries work out of their homes.
2. We use all kinds of technology to reduce our overhead and administrative costs such as digital patient charts that come in from our partner hospitals. We receive 10,000 of these charts every month and by doing it digitally, we save millions of dollars in shipping, handling and storage.
3. We manage The Smile Train like a business.
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