For four decades, Austin Smiles has built its mission around a simple idea: children born with cleft lip and palate deserve access to comprehensive care, whether they live in Central Texas or Latin America.
For board member and 40th anniversary gala co-chair Dina Melhem, that mission is deeply personal. Born in Lebanon with bilateral cleft lip and palate, Melhem came to Austin with her family as a baby in search of medical care. Through Austin Smiles and Dr. Richard Parker, she received the surgeries she needed throughout childhood.
“Austin Smiles has just been a big part of my life since I was a year old,” Melhem says.
Her treatment was extensive, with surgeries continuing through her teens. Years later, she began volunteering with the organization and joined a medical mission to El Salvador in 2013. Today, she helps lead the organization that helped shape her own life.
“It means a lot to see the number of lives that they have changed and how much they do locally,” she says. “For 40 years, they’ve changed thousands of lives.”
Those lives are also what keep Jennifer Brown coming back. A family and pediatric acute care nurse practitioner at Dell Children’s Medical Center, Brown joined her first Austin Smiles mission to El Salvador in 2012. She has returned nearly every year since, sometimes twice a year, and now also serves on the board.
“I think I’ve kind of found the thing that I want to do outside of work and give back in a different way,” Brown says. “It’s something I look forward to every year.”
Mission weeks are demanding. Teams triage patients, prepare operating rooms and spend four days performing surgeries, often working until every scheduled patient is finished. Brown estimates teams may perform roughly 10 to 12 surgeries a day, in addition to dental services.
But cleft care rarely ends in the operating room. Brown emphasizes that patients may need multiple procedures along with speech and feeding therapy and long-term support.
“It’s a lifelong thing,” she says. “It covers the surgical correction, but then there’s the speech therapy that comes after. There’s feeding therapies that come after, and then it’s just a lifelong support that the patient and the families need.”
Austin Smiles has expanded that support closer to home through local programs, family support groups, and events such as Camp Amigo. For Melhem, who remembers growing up without that kind of community, the connection matters.
“You form bonds and friendships, and your children are not alone either,” she says.
The organization will mark its milestone Nov. 7 with its 40th Anniversary Wish Upon A Smile Gala at The Oasis on Lake Travis. For Melhem, the celebration is both a look back and an invitation to expand the work ahead, from reaching more countries to involving more medical professionals and local volunteers.
“I want to help change and continue to grow the organization,” she says.
After 40 years, both women describe Austin Smiles less as an organization than a family.
“It feels like home, and it feels like family,” Brown says. “We all have that same common goal to help the kids and the families.”
Melhem puts the legacy in even simpler terms.
“I would say the smiles,” she says. “They may be another number, but really it’s another smile. It’s someone that is going to one day change the world.”
To learn more and to support Austin Smiles, please visit www.austinsmiles.org.