It’s a horrific story. Agathe stopped smiling and when Glo Science founders Dr. Jonathan Levine and his wife Stacey Levine met Agathe on a trip to Rwanda in 2009, they found a woman who was covering her mouth by hand when she spoke. “Our first meeting with Agathe was eye opening, meaningful beyond words. We were realizing that we were in her home and would be able to make a dramatic difference in her life with a new smile,” the Levines tell us.
They promised to fix her smile and right there, took some molds before returning to New York City. They came back to Agathe’s village with a set of custom dentures. The change in Agathe’s attitude was immediate and her newly minted smile beamed so bright that it became the spark for Glo Good, the Levine’s foundation whose mission is to “enable more people to smile.”
Next came three small clinics to help Rwandans get some much needed dental care. Aside from horrors like Agathe’s, one of the oft overlooked tragedies from destitution is the havoc it can wreak on teeth. And not in the cosmetic kinda way, or even the sad health levels you might assume. “The large body of evidence linking oral health disease to systemic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and pre-term births is so important to share and prevent. It’s not always about the beauty—we need to focus on the health of the mouth,” the Levines say.
With the clinics, Glo Good provides basic care and treatment to their respective villages and sets out to provide the tools—simple things like tooth brushes and paste—for Rwanda’s people to take care of their teeth.
From there, the foundation has turned back to its own country. “We started our GLO Good Foundation work in Rwanda and have since been doing initiatives and work in the USA starting right in our own backyard here in New York City,” they explained to us, “We put on a wonderful event with Dr. Oz and the Harlem Children’s Zone back in January and the children of the Lower East Side Preparatory School only yesterday”
As part of their mission, every time you purchase their at home teeth whitening system, which, by the way won a highly coveted Edison Award for innovation in 2012, Glo Good donates an oral health kit, filled with toothbrush, toothpaste, dental floss and educational material, to someone in need.
“And aside from our oral kit donations, Dr. Levine performs dental work on those in need of urgent and regular care. We set up clinics and screened hundreds of children and their mothers who survived the genocide in Rwanda in the years prior. It was such a success in Rwanda so we have plans to do the same here in the USA very soon.
To learn more about the Glo Good Foundation, visit Gloscience.com.
GLO Good is a sponsored project of The Giving Back Fund, an IRS approved 501(c)(3) public charity.
