The Smile Foundation
SAAAD proudly supports Smile Foundation: a significant, innovative, positive and open-minded organisation dedicated to bringing smiles to children with facial anomalies.
Smile Foundation is a South African, non-profit organisation that brings professional people together for the purpose of providing expert surgical intervention. This organisation creates social involvement; enables sensible corporate social investment which can make a difference in the lives of these children. Our partnership with Smile Foundation is instrumental in ensuring that together we are able to offer a child all the necessary treatments to make their dream smile a reality.
This is an example of the result of the type of work that the Smile Foundation does:
The type of assistance that we are looking for from dental professionals:
- Basic Dental: regular preventative and restorative care
- Orthodontics at a later stage once they're older
- Prosthodontic Care: artificial teeth, dental appliances, dental bridges, 'speech bulbs', palatal lifts
- Assistance with hypodontia/extra teeth/dystrophic teeth
On average, the Smile Foundation assists between 180 - 200 children around the country. The majority (75%) of these are cleft lip or cleft palate patients, and therefore require dental assistance at some point during their surgical process.
In 2012 Dr Ivonne Meyer initiated ‘Uhuru Smile’, a fundraising drive to create awareness and raise funds for the Smile Foundation. The 5-member team summited Kilimanjaro’s Uhuru Peak on the morning of 7 September 2012, thereby raising R150 000 to operate children born with cleft lip and palate deformities.
www.smilefoundationsa.org
The Dental Wellness Trust
SAAAD is proud to be associated with The Dental Wellness Trust, a London-based registered charity promoting dental wellness to less fortunate communities in the UK and abroad. In the future, the Trust plan to do this through innovative oral health education programmes and treatment for those in need. At the forefront of The Trust's work is the promotion of oral health, which is integral to one's general health and quality of life.
We believe that every person has a right of access to oral health care, and a life of dignity, free from pain. This is why, in the future, the Dental Wellness Trust plans to focus on long term and sustainable preventative oral health strategies to help those in need.
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