About Smile Rescue Fund for Kids
Our Story: Reaching the Unreachable
Smile Rescue Fund for Kids (SRFK) was founded by Dr. Leon Klempner, a (now retired) Long Island-based orthodontist with a lifelong dedication to treating children born with severe dentofacial and craniofacial deformities.
For over 15 years, Dr. Klempner traveled the globe with prominent volunteer medical organizations. While this work was life-changing for thousands, he kept encountering a heartbreaking, recurring gap in the system: the children with the most severe deformities were routinely left behind.
Because complex craniofacial cases require massive resources, multiple specialized surgeries, and months of recovery, large-scale charities are often forced to prioritize efficiency—treating many children with milder conditions rather than a select few with extreme needs.
Left without care, and without hope, these children had nowhere to turn. Dr. Klempner refused to accept that any child was "too difficult" to treat. In May 2011, he founded Smile Rescue Fund for Kids to step in precisely where the rest of the world stops.
Our Evolution: From a Single Smile to Entire Villages
Our mission began with a one-child-at-a-time approach. In 2013, SRFK secured the funding and medical visas to bring our first patient, an 11-year-old Kenyan girl named Saline, to the United States. Saline suffered from the effects of Noma, a severe facial infection. Through a partnership with the craniofacial team at Stony Brook University Hospital, her deformities were structurally corrected. Today, Saline is back home, thriving, attending school, and living with a renewed sense of dignity.
However, treating Saline’s condition revealed a deeper truth: addressing a medical condition without addressing the environment that caused it is a temporary fix. Saline’s condition was a direct result of contaminated drinking water and severe malnutrition. To create lasting change, SRFK expanded its scope. Today, we scale up our surgical intervention globally while simultaneously fortifying the home communities of our children through three vital sustainability pillars:
Unsanitary living conditions are a root cause of catastrophic facial infections. SRFK prevents these diseases at the source by installing large-scale rainwater harvesting tanks in underserved villages, replacing contaminated water sources with reliable, sanitary drinking water.
Clean Water Infrastructure
In rural areas without electrical grids, families are forced to rely on kerosene lamps for evening light. Kerosene is expensive, highly flammable, and breathing its fumes is the health equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. SRFK provides sustainable solar lamps to school-aged children, eliminating toxic fumes and allowing them to study safely.
Solar Power & Safety
Children with physical and developmental challenges in developing regions are often completely isolated from society. We provide wheelchairs to ensure these children can physically get to school, alongside manually powered sewing machines and materials so they can learn a trade, manufacture school uniforms, and build financial independence.
Adaptive Mobility & Vocation
Lunch for Educational Achievement Program (LEAP)
The environments our patients come from are often directly responsible for the health crises they endure. When a child finishes surgery and prepares to return home, we face a tough reality: we are sending them back to the same conditions. True recovery means changing those conditions.
In rural Kenya, severe food insecurity actively derails a child's education and health. Without a school lunch program, vulnerable children and orphans are forced to make a devastating choice. Some stay at school all day on an empty stomach, unable to concentrate. Others walk miles back home mid-day to assist with domestic chores and prepare food, causing them to miss afternoon lessons entirely or return too exhausted to learn. The result is chronic absenteeism and stunted academic achievement.
The Solution: The Smile Rescue LEAP Program targets these gaps by providing hot, nutritious daily lunches directly at school. We remove the burden of daytime foraging so children can stay healthy, focused, and in the classroom.
The Impact of your Gift:
Because a small amount goes an incredibly long way, the financial breakdown to completely change a student's educational trajectory is simple and direct:
$10 / month feeds a child for an entire month.
$120 / year secures a student’s nutrition and education for a full school year.
Our Goal: We are actively seeking individual and corporate sponsors to secure full-year funding for 100 vulnerable children.
Board of Directors
Jennifer Crean
Alexander B. Dagum, MD
Amy Epstein, MBA
Melissa Studin Young, Esq.
Maggie-Jean Hanley-Mazza
Medical Advisory Board
The Smile Rescue Fund for Kids has brought together a team of medical experts in the field of health care in order to choose appropriate candidates and develop a treatment plan and coordinate procedures. Each expert has agreed to donate their time and services without compensation to help children in need.
Plastic Surgery
Alexander Dagum, MD – Plastic & Craniofacial Surgery, Stony Brook School of Medicine
Stephen Coccaro MD – Plastic and Craniofacial Surgery, Suffolk Plastic Surgeons, PC
Renato Freitas, MD – Plastic & Craniofacial Surgery, Hospital de Clinicas, Curitiba, Brazil
Raymond Harshbarger, MD – Plastic & Craniofacial Surgery, U of T at Austin, Dell Children’s
Peter Taub, MD – Plastic & Craniofacial Surgery, Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, NY
Orthodontics
Leon Klempner, DDS– Orthodontics, Faculty, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, Montefiore Einstein School of Dentistry, Mount Sinai Department of Dentistry
Pediatric Surgery
Richard Scriven, MD – Pediatric Surgeon, Stony Brook Medicine
Pediatric Medicine/Neurology
Alice Rutatangwa, DO – Pediatric Medicine/Neurology, Stony Brook School of Medicine
Pediatric Dentistry
Sylvia Noah, DDS – Pediatric Dentistry, Gertrude’s Children’s Hospital, Nairobi Kenya
Scott Goldstein, DDS – Pediatric Dentistry, Pediatric Dentistry of L.I.
Fred Ferguson, DDS – Pediatric Dentistry, Stony Brook School of Dental Medicine
Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery
Stephen Sachs DDS – Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery, NY Center for Orthognathic & MaxillofacialSurgery
General Dentistry
Diane Axelrod, DDS – General Dentistry, Drs. Witrock & Axelrod, LLP
Audiology
Jamie Riordan, Au.D. – Audiologist, Stony Brook School of Medicine
Speech & Language Pathology
Kerri Elorriaga, MS – Speech & Language Pathology, Stony Brook School of Medicine
Jodi Wolinsky, MS – Speech & Language Pathology
Nursing
Lisa Klempner, RN – Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Laurie Klempner, RN, MSN
Psychology
Ready to Make a Difference?
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