Unspoken Smiles Fellowship

Unspoken Smiles Fellowship promotes both long-term oral health and economic security in the world’s most disadvantaged regions. 

Oral diseases are an obstacle to development. Something as preventable as tooth decay can impair people’s ability to eat, to interact with others, attend school. The Foundation provides early oral health treatment and education for children, and dental assistance fellowships to young local women with otherwise inadequate earning opportunities, empowering them with a sustainable career in Dentistry. 

This outreach model is not about charity, but about transforming the way at-risks individuals perceive oral health by teaching them proper oral hygiene techniques and show them how they should be implemented into their daily routines  and its importance in their overall health and well-being.

Our  Strategy to change the world is to create better access to oral care and deliver high-quality  services  to more than one million people in under-served communities around the world by 2030, and partnering with like-minded organizations and local governments to train, equip, and pay young women as community oral health  professionals to contribute to the health and well-being of their own communities.

Our innovative app could transform and impact dentistry in a multitude of ways, from electronic record-keeping and data driven metrics to new novel prevention methods—and revolutionary treatment options. It will serve as an information infrastructure to support better oral health care delivery, quality measurement and improvement, and public accountability. Substantive impact measurement can be costly and complex, but it’s critical for organizations like ours pursuing greater scale and efficacy. This app which will serve as an open source that will ultimately facilitate impact tracking across sectors – to the benefit of corporations, professionals’ volunteers, patients, and local governments globally. 

We truly believe that technological innovation will ultimately improve and broaden access to dental care, allowing for same-day care that translates to fewer office visits—making a healthy smile more affordable. As more high-quality digital information becomes available to dental professionals, the potential for more precise diagnosis and treatment will only continue to grow. Data driven insights including age, medical and dental health history will, for example, allow dental professionals to pinpoint your susceptibility to various types of oral disease. Moreover, dentists could increasingly tailor treatment based on the specific bacteria that’s causing your problem. 

Over the next twelve months, our team’s long-view focus will be on a two major goals:

1. To officially launch the beta version of our mobile app on both ios and android. 

2. To have 1,000 paying organizations and corporations using our app.

Our vision over the next three to five years is to have our app become an integral part of dental missions around the world, as well as increasing access to dental service opportunities to over a million people who have never previously had access to care.

The future of dentistry will looks very different than the practice of today: no need to drill, no injections, easier access, and shorter treatment time. Overall, there will be a greater emphasis on education and prevention that translates into fewer cavities and less periodontal disease. The predictions: dentistry will increasingly provide nice, white, healthy smiles.

With growing global attention on prevention, we want dentistry to become  more mobile and flexible in order to better serve the next generation. The Foundation will use a direct sales approach and a variety of advertising channels to increase its exposure among prospective customers as well as its beneficiaries. Specific channels will include:  

Word of mouth  

Public relations

Cause marketing

Cross-promotion

Earned media

Social networking

We have served over 6,040 children in our low-income under-served target communities, that is over 6,040 children who now have a better opportunity to avoid awful, painful diseases like tooth decay or gum disease for the rest of their lives. This means 6,040 children who are less likely to miss school due to pain and disease or 6,040 children that are less likely to endure difficulties eating because of tooth decay. Given the success of our pilot program in Haiti, Kurdistan Regional Iraq, El Salvador, Guatemala, and India. 

Our unintentional benefit of “Uberized” dentistry over the next 12 months is the impact on those who live far from a dentist—with the potential to serve over 100,000 people. Currently 44% of the world's populations do not have access to basic dental care. Our mobile app, in many cases, can help millions over the next three years. With a patient or caregiver simply texting or emailing a cell phone pictures of a tooth problem to a dentist, our app will facilitate easier diagnosis from these images and recommend the next best steps in treatment using our dental hubs platform.

I have a dental hygiene degree and a n MPA from Columbia SIPA. The Foundation’s Board of Directors includes Dr. Edly Destine, who has been practicing dentistry in New York for 4 years, and Lamia Funti business owner of Le Souk restaurant, Maria Caccucciolo an Intellectual Property Lawyer, and Talia Castro-Pozo, Actress. Between my passion for the Foundation’s cause and personal knowledge of conditions in those communities that I traveled, Dr. Edly’s extensive experience in dentistry, Talia, Lamia and Maria’s ability to implement business solutions, the Foundation is well stocked with human capital.

The nonprofit hybrid sector is booming and selling services is the dominant mode of fundraising. Therefore, our foundation will obtain more funding by selling our services through the app rather than solely relying upon charitable donations and grants.

Therefore, our revenue model is to charge a regular fee from organizations who simply want to list their events and recruit volunteer dentists from our platform, and a premium fee for those who are looking to use our data collection platform, or research or government agencies who want to buy our data.

Moreover, we will also have opportunity for corporate sponsorship to advertise on our platform. 

With the goal to launch the inaugural class of 100 Fellows in our target communities in India, Haiti, Guatemala, Iraq, and Colombia, as well as the mobile app development process, the Solve Award would give us the jumpstart needed to transform the goodwill of average Americans into a stable and independent source of funding which would allow us to train, equip, and pay more women as community oral health professionals “Fellows” to contribute to the health and well-being of their own communities and be integral to shaping the program and the community of global Fellows for future years.

Unspoken Smiles challenge is to rigorously evaluate & optimize program delivery and efficiency during eventual phase I delivery. However, we hope Solve could help provide:

1. Disciplined Delivery & Impact Tracking—consistent use of mobile-configured web-based reporting with plan to use to application to track baseline conditions, delivery and outcomes
2. Improving Visibility into Expense Including Program Segment Financials—budgeting and tracking by service category (e.g., education, economic development, treatment program, mobile app costs)
3. Better ways to leveraged the use of In-Kind Donations—optimize use of professional and local volunteers; lock-in relationships with dental kit supporters, including Colgate.