Cleft Proud. Peoria Proud.

Thank you for another awesome year, Peoria!! 

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Every three minutes a baby is born with a cleft lip, cleft palate, or both. Clefts may require multiple surgeries and the journey usually involves difficulties eating, breathing, hearing, and speaking. It's a journey that is emotional. A journey that often times is isolating. But most importantly, a journey that opens your heart and eyes to a world that is beyond your child's smile. 

If we have learned one thing along our journey (outside of how tough our kids are), it's how supportive the cleft community is. With the support of the Peoria community, we've found the strength we didn't even know we had. As seven families from Peoria, IL, we're teaming up to bring awareness to the cleft community and help raise money to provide forever smiles to children in need. 

We are partnering with Smile Train, an international children’s charity with a sustainable approach to a single, solvable problem: cleft lip and palate.

Smile Train supports local medical professionals and local hospitals, including the surgeons who operate on our children, to go beyond surgery. They provide speech therapy, psychological support, nutritional services, orthodontics, and other essential forms of care to ensure that children with clefts have everything they need to not just live, but thrive.

Thank you for supporting our fundraiser with Smile Train – together we can change the world one smile at a time!

- The Chan, Fiddes, Hatfield, Ihnken, Mentgen, Reeser & Young Family