Teeth Dreams: Year-One Lessons At United Way's First-Of-Its-Kind Dental Clinic

Over a million dollars of donated dental health services, impacting 1,700 patients across 2,400 patient visits: That’s a quick rundown of the first 365 days at United We Smile, the first-of-its-kind charity dental clinic United Way of Northwest Michigan (UWNWMI) launched one year ago.

Speaking to The Ticker last spring, UWNWMI Executive Director Seth Johnson said his team had spent much of the pandemic looking “at how we can better serve the community.” As he explained it, the community impacts of UWNWMI – and other United Way branches across the country – have historically “been a lot around fundraising and grantmaking.” COVID-19 got the organization thinking about how it might be more hands-on in meeting local needs, with UWNWMI ultimately landing on dental care as an area where it could orchestrate some much-needed change.

“We realized that there's just a massive lack of dental care for children in our region, as well as for pregnant women, for veterans, and for those with developmental and cognitive disabilities,” Johnson told The Ticker at the time. “It got us thinking about what we could do to address those problems.”

That thought process led to United We Smile, which harnesses donated services from the University of Michigan School of Dentistry and Traverse City's Resort District Dental Society (RDDS) to treat patients who might not otherwise be able to afford dental care. The clinic opened its doors at Copper Ridge in September 2023, making UWNWMI the first of the more than 1,100 United Ways around the world to operate its own dental clinic.

A year later, Johnson says UWNWMI might have actually underestimated how much northern Michigan needed a free-of-charge dental clinic.

“We have a big wait list of veterans who are interested in becoming patients,” Johnson says. “We have people who are traveling long, long distance to get here. We have families coming from far south of Cadillac, or from the U.P., just to receive care. I think that shows how wide of a need there is for dental care. It’s quite striking and stark – and daunting.”

“Daunting” might be an understatement given how demand at United We Smile still far outstrips the clinic’s capabilities. One of the big goals for year two, Johnson says, is to shorten that gap.

“We want to be able to serve more patients,” Johnson tells The Ticker. “We want to make sure we are continuing to offer a high level if care, but we're absolutely looking at ways to increase accessibility of care as well. To do that, we need to become more solvent. The program really operates at a deficit at this point, because we're seeing so many uninsured individuals coming through; we were not anticipating the sheer level of patients who don't have any insurance but need care. Of the veterans that we've seen, for instance, none have had insurance. That means that we have been doing all our work for the veteran community at no cost to them, and purely on philanthropic support.”

That’s where UWNWMI’s history as a fundraising powerhouse will come in handy. With a year’s worth of cases under their belts, Johnson says the United We Smile team plans on getting more aggressive about telling the story of the clinic to “the giving community" locally and beyond.

Case studies shared with The Ticker include helping a three-year-old boy whose dental issues were so severe that he stopped eating, or treating a Purple Heart veteran who had teeth problems from when a mortar shell exploded near his face during the Vietnam War. Whether it’s private donations, nonprofit support, or government grants, Johnson feels confident United We Smile will be able to up its fundraising game significantly now that it has a track record.

One area where United We Smile won’t be expanding is in the demographics it serves. When the clinic opened, UWNWMI limited its services to the groups it believed were most underserved by northern Michigan’s existing dental infrastructure: veterans, pregnant and nursing women, young children, HIV and AIDS patients, and people with cognitive disabilities. With demand across those groups already so high, Johnson says it’s unlikely United We Smile would ever be able to serve a broader clientele. Still, he's hopeful the work the clinic is doing will have a domino effect that benefits other parts of the population.

“We want to do the best job that we can serving the patients in those targeted demographics that we already serve,” Johnson says. “I think there will always be a need for more dental care in this region, but I hope that, by us doing this, our other partners can be able to do more dental work for other patients.”

And speaking of domino effects, Johnson shares that the successful first year at United We Smile hasn’t gone unnoticed by other United Ways around the world. 

“I’ve definitely had a lot of calls from other United Ways,” Johnson says. “They’re saying, ‘How did you do this? Dental care is an issue in my community, too. How could we structure something like this?’ No one’s done it yet, but we’re happy to help if they do.”

Pictured: A group of volunteer dentists in front of the United We Smile clinic.