Operation Smile is not-for-profit medical relief organization that, according to their website, “provides reconstructive facial surgery to indigent children and young adults in 16 developing countries.”

Closer to home, however, Operation Smile may have been as much of a life changer for Brynn Furey ’16 as it is for the children the program treats.

During Furey’s sophomore year, a family friend recommended she go to an Operation Smile sponsored International Student Leadership Conference (ISLC) in Ireland. Furey admitted the destination was one of the only reasons she initially attended, saying, “When I found out where we’d be going I thought, ‘Yeah, let’s go to Ireland!’”

Heading into the first conference, Furey thought, “I want to get involved with women’s education. I don’t relate personally with this cleft lip and cleft palate thing.” But the longer she stayed, the more she realized that “this mission is more than just fixing cosmetic features. It’s about making children happy and allowing people to have a normal life without being shunned by society for their deformities.”

Furey explained that at ISLC, “Students from all over the world come together and are taught motivation skills, how to think outside of themselves, and—of course—community service.” Students in the program are broken up into different teams, and throughout the conference these teams compete to raise money from family and friends. All funds raised through the students’ efforts goes to that year’s conference objective. In 2014 the group collected enough money to build a medical center in Paraguay where people can more easily access the surgeries they need.

The standard object of Operation Smile is to provide free surgical care for children with cleft lip and cleft palate. However, the organization has been known operate on adults and individuals with other deformities. Last year, when Furey went to Cambodia on a medical mission trip, she saw an operation performed on a child whose fingers had been fused together after a burn to his hand.

There are four basic pillars behind the Operation, values that can be applied far beyond cleft palate syndrome: leadership, education, service, and awareness. Since Furey has become involved in Operation Smile, her interpretation of the mission has been “spreading awareness and teaching people to be leaders in their communities by getting involved globally in matters much greater than themselves.”

Last year, she started Kent School’s own chapter of Operation Smile. One of their most successful projects was making cards for National Service Week. While these cards were being worked on, a lot of students came up and asked, “Who are these cards for? What is Operation Smile?” Furey came away from the experience saying, “It was really nice to see students sitting down and making cards for surgical patients. It really made me feel as though we helped raise awareness here at school.” In the future, the club plans to hold an Operation Smile summit called ‘ULead Connecticut’ to bring together even more students interested in the organization.

At Kent, it can be tough to think outside of our little bubble of nonstop studying and endless college applications, but what Furey has experienced has given her a chance to “look at what is actually going on in the world [when] sometimes it’s really easy to get caught up here [at Kent].” After two years of involvement with Operation Smile, Furey no longer focuses inward but tries instead to, “think about what [she] can do to help others.”