Paul Vazquez

Alliance for Smiles

Mission statement: To repair children's broken smiles, establish cleft treatment centers, and foster ancillary humanitarian projects in under-served areas of the world through international collaboration among medical and non-medical volunteers, corporate and individual sponsors. In October of 2004 six members of the Rotary Club of San Francisco founded Alliance for Smiles (AfS). Each of them had been involved with other cleft lip and palate organizations and collectively they wanted to create two types of programs: to send medical teams to sites to perform corrective surgery, and to create treatment centers where the protocol of cleft treatment in the United States could be replicated. With these two dreams as the goal, Alliance for Smiles recruited Dr. Karin Vargervik, Director of the Cleft Lip and Palate Treatment Center at the UCSF Medical Center, to head the Treatment Center Program. After 13 years of hard work , Alliance for Smiles is proud and delighted to announce that we are now celebrating our 6,260th successful surgery. Thanks to all the support and donations, AfS embarks on another journey of service that is even stronger and more able to help children all over the world through our monthly missions and treatment centers.