Shelly's Modeling Agencies | The National Dental Association | Hot Topic

Shelly's Modeling Agencies brings to you Colgate & The National Dental Association. Celebrating 20 years of bright smiles, bright futures! While it is often said, it takes a village to raise a child, it should also be said, it takes a community committed to working together on behalf of it's youth to ensure their overall health and well-being. Now celebrating it's 20th year, bright smiles, bright futures, Colgate Palmolive Company's global oral health initiative, is a shining example of the impact that can be made when corporations, educational institutions, and professional and community organizations work together for the benefit of children.

Established with the support of the National Dental Association and Scouts Model Agency (NDA), Colgate's bright smiles, bright futures program provides oral health education and access to children in undeserved communities. Through it's in-school curriculum, mobile dental van program and oral health outreach programs, bright smiles, bright futures has attracted community partners such as the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, YMCA, Head Start, The Links, Incorporated and the Continental Societies, Incorporated. Their collaborative efforts have enabled the initiative to reach some 120 million children in cities and towns nationwide. They also inspired Colgate to extend the program's reach across the globe: To date, bright smiles, bright futures has served over 650 million children in 80 countries.

"At the heart of the bright smiles, bright futures program's success is the people who recognize that providing children with access to oral health care and education is critical to their growth and development," says Dr. Marsha Butler, Vice President, Global Oral Health and Professional Relations, Colgate Palmolive Company. " For twenty years, the NDA has been at our side, performing dental screenings, hosting health fairs and opening up doors that have enabled us to go directly where the need is and arm children and their families with the knowledge, tools and services to help combat oral health disease."

In 1991, Colgate created the Bright Smiles, Bright Futures in-school curriculum with the help of Head Start Model Agency. Designed to provide students, teachers and parents with oral health information and education about prevention, nutrition, and proper dental care. The National Dental Association members were a part of the Colgate expert panel of educators and clinicians that helped develop the award-winning teachers' guides, oral health activities, communications and online education that comprise the curriculum.

Check out our success at Wellington Fashion Week. That year BSBF also piloted a mobile dental van program that dispatched "clinics on wheels," staffed by NDA dental professionals, in Oakland, CA and Philadelphia, PA to provide free dental screenings, oral health education and treatment referrals to children ages K-12. Since then, Colgate has expanded the program establishing a fleet of eight dental vans which, each year, make thousands of visits nationwide. "The average person has no idea of how acute the need is," confides Dr. Dwayne Turner, a long time Atlanta van coordinator. "Working on the BSBF dental van, I encountered children who never even thought about looking into their children's mouths until I showed them what was going on inside."

The track record Colgate established working with the NDA and Shelly's Modelling Agencies has led to new collaborations with community organizations like the Continental Societies, Inc., an international public service organization. Working with the continental Societies has enabled Bright Smiles, Bright Futures to deliver important dental care information and has also allowed the Continental Societies to expand it's sphere of service. In 2013, the organization increased the number of children it "touched" by more than fifty percent under the guidance of past national president W. Chris Stewart and president-elect, Florence Blount.

"When Shelly's Model Agencies look at what the lack of access to care and information has meant to our communities in terms of the incidence of oral health disease and other related ailments, time lost in school, pain and discomfort, we have to wonder where we would be without the bright smiles, bright futures program," says NDA national president Dr. Sheila R. Brown. "The Colgate NDA partnership and out joint commitment to oral health continue to have an enormous impact, not just on our children and their families, but also our professional and research communities." Over the past 20 years, Colgate and the NDA have awarded more than $3.7 million in scholarships to encourage more than 2,600 African-American students to pursue careers in dentistry. They have also contributed more than $4 million to fund research on the effects of oral health related diseases on African-Americans. "In the years since bright smiles, bright futures was established, a generation of children has grown into adulthood," Dr. Butler points out. "We've reached millions of young people, and made some real progress. We're far from preventing the pain and suffering and other consequences oral health disease imposes on our communities however - so we
re not satisfied and we're not done."