By Diana Brement, Jewish Sound Columnist
“It started in 2012,” explains Zoe Mesnik-Greene, when “I saw a video about children…with cleft palate condition.”
She can’t pinpoint why, but that video made her want to do something.
“I asked myself, am I going to take action…or just put it on Facebook?” she said.
Perhaps because “we know how to treat cleft condition,” action seemed possible: “Just a matter of bringing funding and resources together,” she said.
Approximately one out of 700 children worldwide is born with this condition, which can be a combined cleft palate and lip or just the palate. In Western countries, most children are treated as infants, but in impoverished areas, children often go untreated. Most cleft palate organizations price treatment at $250 per child.
Brainstorming about sustainable approaches to raising money, Zoe “started thinking and thinking [and] it somehow came to me,” she said. “My lip balm — it’s something I use all the time!” Lip balms are inexpensive and consumers buy two to five a year.
The University of Washington communications major started researching lip balms, creating a recipe “so pure you can actually eat it,” and choosing a manufacturer in New Mexico. Her first order was sold door-to-door by volunteers and through doctors’ and dentists’ offices. By March 2013, she’d raised $30,000, but it was “not very efficient.”
A veteran of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle’s J.Team teen philanthropy program, Zoe has had “a deep passion for philanthropy…for quite some time,” and wanted to apply those ideas to a consumer product that would “create impact in people’s lives,” including not just the children with cleft palates, but the ingredient producers and the buyers. She took things a step further, creating the company Lasting Smiles, with more flavors and using fairly traded ingredients from cooperative farms in Burkina Faso, India and Peru.
She also partnered with Smile Train (www.smiletrain.org), the largest cleft organization in the world, in the first-ever partnership between the lip-care industry and that non-profit. Additionally, money raised from Lasting Smile sales pays for surgeries in the countries where they source their ingredients.
In Peru this past summer, Zoe visited the cooperative that provides Lasting Smiles’s cocoa butter and watched a cleft palate surgery. She hopes to create more connections between consumers and producers, raising customer awareness about product origins and showing farmers the results of their work.
“The farmers were very proud to see the lip balm,” she says.
Lasting Smile launched this past November, selling at Nordstrom, Whole Foods Market, Drugstore.com and Walgreens.com. The November shipment almost sold out, although some Washington Whole Foods stores have stock.
A competitive athlete since childhood — she’s been a gymnast, pole vaulter and rower — Zoe attributes some of her focus to her athletic discipline. Launching Lasting Smiles did force her to take fall quarter off school, but she’s returning full time this quarter.
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Zoe’s dad, Seattle dermatologist Steve Greene, also did something interesting in 2013, publishing an article in Voice of Conservative/Masorti Judaism magazine.
Steve wanted to put on a Bar Mitzvah tisch for his son Marcus. A tisch — literally “table” in Yiddish — is better known as a wedding custom when the groom and his male friends gather around a table before the ketubah signing. The groom often attempts to impart some learning or wisdom while his friends joke and maybe have some drinks.
For a Bar or Bat Mitzvah, it’s to help the young person in “becoming successful, joining the community, joining the tribe.”
Steve got the idea from other members of his synagogue, Congregation Beth Shalom in Seattle. He brought Marcus together with some older boys and men who had an impact in his life, gathering at a community center a few days before the Bar Mitzvah to play basketball and have snacks and decidedly non-alcoholic beverages. The men shared reflections “about moving up the growth ladder,” recalls Steve, t”hat it’s okay to make mistakes, take risks.”
Looking for information on organizing the event, Steve found nothing. So, “after it was all over, I decided to write this article,” he said, to inform and inspire, and because “I thought it was cool enough to share with others.”
Following publication, “I got emails from all over North America,” said Steve, so the magazine asked him to add a “Top Ten list” for making a Bar Mitzvah tisch. It can be read at www.cjvoices.org/article/the-bar-mitzvah-tisch (or just search “bar mitzvah tisch”).
Having attended and worked at the Conservative movement’s Camp Ramah in upstate New York as a kid, Steve said he has “always been interested in Jewish education…and ongoing Jewish learning.” He is a board-certified dermatologist and owner of Advanced Dermatology and Laser Institute of Seattle.