Clara and her father on the road to Operation Smile’s medical mission in Madagascar for a new smile and a new life.
Your roadmap to a future worth shaping
Roadmap 2021 & Beyond: Smiles Ahead is part of our promise to better inform you about Operation Smile Canada’s current and future funding plans. Because without you and our dedicated corps of volunteers, none of them are achievable.
Operation Smile’s four decades of experience providing high-quality cleft surgery and care has uniquely positioned us to close the disastrous surgical gap that affects five billion people, leading to the suffering and early death of tens of millions every year. Astonishingly, more people die from lack of access to surgical care than from malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS combined. This must change, and with your partnership, it will.
Together with hundreds of local and international health partners, Operation Smile offers vital surgical and pre/post-surgical services with a primary focus on delivering comprehensive cleft care, while strengthening local health systems through specialized training, education and research.
Every single action we take — from each ambitiously constructed care plan to each delicately sewn suture — reflects our commitment to creating a fairer, more compassionate world.
Thank you for your partnership in our mission of hope. We hope that Roadmap 2021 & Beyond is beneficial to your personal philanthropy and charitable gift planning, and our team looks forward to continuing the conversation with you.
It all starts with a child… and leads to a smile… and so much more!
Ken Wilson, MD, FRCSC
Board President, Operation Smile Canada
Operation Smile Plastic Surgery Volunteer
Mark Climie-Elliott
CEO and Chief Smile Officer,
Operation Smile Canada
Hope on the Horizon: Operation Smile Canada’s Plans for 2021 & Beyond
Every program presented here is made possible by donations from generous Canadians like you. Save and change thousands of lives, enable research to prevent future cleft births, and train and educate hundreds of local medical professionals in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.
This can be your impact … and your legacy.
Delivering Safe, Effective Surgery at the Local Level
Every year, Operation Smile conducts over 150 surgical programs, working closely with local or regional volunteers, staff, communities and hospitals to provide the highest quality of surgical cleft care possible. Given the uncertainty around air travel, which affects our international surgical programs, we are focused on delivering more locally volunteer-led surgical programs in 2021 and beyond. We are fortunate that decades of investing in training local medical volunteers has paid dividends: 85% of Operation Smile’s 6,000+ credentialed medical volunteers are now from the low- and middle-income countries where we work!
In 2021, Operation Smile Canada is supporting 46 surgical programs in:
- Bolivia 2
- Brazil
- China 2
- Colombia 19
- Dominican Republic 2
- Ecuador
- Honduras 2
- Mexico 5
- Nicaragua 8
- Panama 2
- Peru
- Thailand
These cost as little as $10,000-$50,000 for locally-led surgical programs and up to $200,000+ for larger-scale international surgical programs where hundreds of surgical procedures are possible. Your consideration of a multi-year investment in our core surgical program will ensure we have the funds for more surgical programs in nearly 40 countries around the world.
Your investment provides new smiles to thousands of children like Daniela and Denise all over the world, now and in the years ahead.
Transform More Lives Forever
Investing in Human Potential
Upskill More Local Healthcare Providers
Operation Smile recognizes the critical role people play in the accessibility and availability of surgical care in low- and middle-income countries. We train new healthcare providers and advance the necessary technical and soft skills of existing providers to offer high-quality cleft surgery and care, often in low-resource settings.
Our education and training commitment is currently at $85,000 and growing as we continue to receive requests, including a series of surgical and nursing skills training workshops in Colombia and nasoalveolar molding workshops in the Dominican Republic. Nasoalveolar molding reduces the size of the cleft in the lip, gum, nose or palate prior to surgery with the creation of a molded ‘retainer,’ keeping infants alive and healthy until we can safely operate on them.
Your multi-year investment now can enable skill-building workshops like these, as well as educational medical missions and our highly successful specialized training program for cleft surgeons in the transformative years ahead.
Your investment provides world-class training and education to hundreds of local medical professionals in the countries where we work, in 2021 and beyond.
Battling Malnutrition
Malnutrition is a significant barrier to receiving surgery for many children in the countries we serve. In response, Operation Smile offers nutrition programs that provide ongoing treatment for patients suffering from nutritional deficiencies, nutrition clinics to parents and the distribution of ready-to-use therapeutic foods (RUTF) — an energy-dense, micronutrient-enriched fortified peanut paste carefully formulated to meet a child’s nutritional requirements.
While waiting for surgery is difficult, the graver concern is that infants born with cleft conditions have nine times the risk of dying within the first year of life. With your generous partnership, this work to increase newborn care and nutritional support has saved lives and will save countless more lives, especially in Africa and Latin America.
We have committed $30,000 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the centre of one of the world’s longest-running humanitarian crises, where life-threatening chronic malnutrition remains alarmingly prevalent. This funding provides a nutrition program and additional patient-centred support.
Your multi-year investment now can expand life-saving pre-surgical programs like this one to help more patients in more countries become healthy enough to receive surgery.
Creating Brighter Futures Through Comprehensive Cleft Care
Many children require multiple surgeries and/or specialized post-surgical care to optimize their health and wellbeing. At our 32 care centres in 16 countries, patients receive free services including cleft and orthognathic surgeries, dentistry, orthodontics, speech therapy, audiology, nutritional counseling and psychosocial care.
The operating costs of our year-round care centres range from $50,000 to $500,000. Canada is committed to funding 10 of these powerhouses of healing, including “The Little House” in Bogotá, Colombia, the oldest and busiest of Operation Smile’s centres (which last year alone provided 500+ surgeries, 3,700+ dental procedures and 23,000+ patient consultations), as well as our care centres in:
- Santa Cruz, Bolivia
- Duitama, Colombia
- Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
- Quito, Ecuador
- Guatemala City, Guatemala
- Tegucigalpa, Honduras
- Guadalajara, Mexico
- Managua, Nicaragua
- Asuncion, Paraguay
Your multi-year investment in care centres now can provide vital surgical care and training for more local medical professionals, as well as create points of access into the healthcare system for tens of thousands of children and their families annually.
Pioneering Foundational Research
Operation Smile conducts research into the genetic and environmental causes of cleft, research that will move our work far beyond the immediate treatment of cleft conditions toward cleft prevention initiatives. Research at this level, with many thousands of research subjects, is critical, but also costly.
Operation Smile Canada is committing an initial investment of $350,000 this year to fund a Canadian-led global research initiative investigating speech optimization in patients with cleft palates. We are seeking partners for a multi-year investment in research that will enable us to continue leading the global effort to discover the primary causes of cleft, along with innovative and alternate treatments.
Your investment makes the impossible possible, now and for years to come, like groundbreaking research into the causes and treatment of cleft, and visionary programs with the potential to make essential surgery available to billions who lack it worldwide.
Kickstart More of Tomorrow’s Advancements
The Next Step
This “roadmap” is designed to spark a conversation with you about the direction we’re taking tomorrow and beyond. This is your chance to help shape that direction and impact the future of entire countries. We ask you to carefully consider a strong, multi-year investment as we forge ahead with the creation of a fairer, more compassionate world.
Further details about our programs are available, and we’ll happily send you printed copies of this roadmap to share with those who you believe would be interested in learning more. As always, we seek your feedback, appreciate your questions and welcome your curiosity. Thank you for being part of our Operation Smile family!
Toll-free:1.844.376.4530 or
Local:647.696.0600
"She’s a different girl completely—even in her character, in the way she communicates, talks and plays," says a member of Clara’s family.