Grant Programs
Smile Train helps people with clefts receive the treatment they could have never accessed otherwise at our over 1,000 partner centers around the world.
Grant Types
Becoming a Partner
All of our partners are united by a common goal: helping children who have no place else to turn. If this is your goal, too, we'd like to partner with you. Contact us at partner@smiletrain.org for more information.
Comprehensive Treatment Grants
Smile Train’s vision is to ensure every child with a cleft can lead a full and productive life. Essential services such as nutritional support, speech therapy, and dental and orthodontic treatments are often required throughout a child's lifetime.
Education and Training Grants
Education and training are the key to Smile Train’s sustainable model. Our funding ensures that medical teams in even the most low-resource settings have access to first-rate educational opportunities, helping improve the proficiency, safety, and quality of care they provide.
Equipment and Supplies Grants
Safety and quality are paramount to Smile Train. Our equipment grants fund everything from cleft sets to pulse oximeters, empowering our partners to provide ever better care for ever more children.
Patient Logistics Grants
This program targets patients whose families could never make it to the hospital for treatment without additional financial support for expenses such as the cost of transportation to and from the hospital and food and shelter once there.
Outreach Grants
While local empowerment is at Smile Train’s core, there are high-need areas where no qualified treatment teams exist. In places like these, we provide support to ensure medical professionals can reach these patients and build the capacity of local providers.
Awareness Grants
These grants support campaigns to educate people about clefts and their treatment, reducing stigma and ensuring patients in need can reach our partner hospitals.
Treatment Partnerships
Smile Train provides financial support and training to local healthcare professionals around the world so that they can treat children with clefts in need in their own communities, empowering patients, families, regional health systems, and medical providers alike.
Our Funding Principles
We Do:
- Focus exclusively on programs related to cleft lips and palates.
- Focus on the low- and middle-income countries with the highest incidence of clefts.
- Support programs that provide free treatment for patients in need.
- Support cleft team members and hospitals that need financial assistance.
- Leverage our support by cost-sharing with our partners.
- Foster self-sufficiency in our partners.
- Closely monitor and manage all of our programs and partners.
- Require all of our partners to adhere to the highest standards of safety and quality.
We Don't:
- Pay for treatment for children whose families can afford it.
- Replace funding or pay for surgeries that other organizations will subsidize (government, insurance, charities, etc.).
- Support organizations that do not provide safe and high-quality treatment.