The Smile Train

The Smile Train is an international charity helping children with cleft lips and palates, founded in 2000 by Brian Mullaney and Charles Wang.

It has been classified as the world’s largest and most cost-effective cleft charity and it also meets extensive standards of America's most experienced charity evaluator. The Smile Train uses technology such as surgery-training software and grading of operations via digital imaging to make it "one of most productive charities, dollar for deed, in the world."

According to a press source, it is said that over the last eight years, Smile Train has performed more than 360,000 cleft surgeries in 74 of the world’s poorest countries, while raising some $85 million last year with worldwide staff strength of just 30 people.

Mullhaney worked in advertising for over 20 years, founded Schell/ Mullaney Advertising, served as Senior Vice President, Creative Director at J. Walter Thompson and Vice President, Creative Director at Young & Rubicam. Mullaney earned a bachelor's degree in business economics from Harvard College. He currently lives on Long Island, New York with his wife Cricket and three children.

Should someone ever search an alternate definition of “selfless”, they might want to consider three words: "Doctor Hirji Adenwalla." To know Dr. Adenwalla, 70, is to understand that no one, anywhere, is more emblematic of the word "selfless." What better way to describe a unique man who, as head of the Charles Pinto Centre for Cleft Lip and Palate in Kerala, India for the past 42 years, has devoted his considerable skills to improving - some might say "salvaging" — the lives of more than 7,000 underprivileged children by giving them the life-transforming ability to smile. Equally remarkable, Dr. Adenwalla has performed every one of these surgeries himself, free of charge, on a budget historically so modest that much of it has resulted from speaking fees. He typically spends his annual vacation making speeches to social service organizations in order to raise funds for the Centre.

In 2001, the first year that The Smile Train was privileged to provide the Charles Pinto Centre with funding, Dr. Adenwalla performed cleft lip and palate repair on an additional 530 children who would otherwise have never received it. "With the help of The Smile Train, we're able to reach out to many more children and change many more lives." says Dr Adenwalla. "I am very excited about what the future holds for this partnership."

A longtime professional associate described the Charles Pinto Center’s work as "truly remarkable," and Dr. Adenwalla as "a legendary surgeon who has touched thousands of lives with his heart, his head and his hands. A very rare combination of huge talent and tiny ego. Dr. Adenwalla himself, of course, dismisses such praise and deflects all compliments. But he reveals at least a part of what motivates him in a short speech he made recently at a Smile Train press conference, the lessons that we learn from human misery are to love, to never forget and to never, never look away.

Smile Train is close to reaching a historic break-even point: it will perform more operations each year than the number of children born each year in developing countries with cleft deformities.

Wish them the best….and anyone who wishes to donate, can do so by CLICKING HERE