Support Healthy Smiles for Children in Ecuador

Thank you for supporting our patients in Ecuador during the past year. By making Telehealth and feeding/nutrition assistance possible, your gift helped Global Smile Foundation (GSF) and Fundación Global Smile-Ecuador provide comprehensive cleft care to patients in a difficult time.

We plan to return to Guayaquil, Ecuador in September 2021 after having had to cancel three outreach programs due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We have expanded this upcoming program to help the hundreds of patients who urgently need our humanitarian cleft care services. So many of our patients have been waiting for care during the last 15 months or even longer, because access to cleft care is extremely limited in the country. In addition, parents of the many new babies born with cleft have asked for assistance.

Fundación Global Smile-Ecuador also hopes to re-open our Cleft Care Center in Guayaquil. The Center was closed temporarily during the pandemic and its reopening will be essential to meeting the needs of our increased patient population.

GlobalGiving will retire this project shortly and we hope you will be part of our new campaign for the September 2021 outreach program. Please follow us on social media or join our monthly updates list (links below).

We are truly grateful for your support.

Sincerely,

Lisa Crist
Director of Development

Links:

• Updates from GSF
• Find us on Instagram
• See our new GlobalGiving campaign

Your support in 2020 enabled the Global Smile Foundation (GSF) and Fundacion Global Smile-Ecuador teams to provide much-needed cleft care for our patients and their families during a difficult time. Telehealth, feeding assistance, and speech therapy video sessions were all made possible through your donations, as well as a limited number of surgeries at our Cleft Care Center.

This month, Ecuador began the widespread distribution of vaccinations against COVID-19. We are watching the public health situation closely and plan to resume our in-person missions to Guayaquil in September 2021. GSF is the largest provider of comprehensive cleft care in Ecuador and we know that our patients need us. Due to the cancelation of missions during the global pandemic, we have more than 100 patients waiting for their first cleft lip surgery and still living with untreated cleft.

In March, we will be launching a new program on GlobalGiving to support our missions in 2021. I hope that you will visit our program page to see how you can continue to make healthy smiles possible for underserved patients.

Please visit the links below for more information and to see the patients whose lives are changed thanks to your generosity. If you have any questions, please contact me at lcrist@gsmile.org.

Best wishes,

Lisa Crist
Director of Development
Global Smile Foundation
www.gsmile.org

Links:

• See Jesus's 10-year transformation to a healthy smile!
• Follow us on Instagram
• Visit our new website!