Creating Smiles: Dental Care for Kids in Los Angeles
Dr. Jay Grossman, Team Los Angeles
Dr. Grossman is a privately practicing dentist in Los Angeles with a commitment to provide free dental care to thousands of homeless men and women living in the area. Twenty years ago he started a non-profit program called Homeless not Toothless as a community project in the Self Expression and Leadership Program at Landmark Education. Over the last twenty years, his project has resulted in 2 million dollars’ worth of free dental care to the homeless of Los Angeles. Upon completing the first year of the Team, Management and Leadership Program three years ago, he had a desire to create a new project that would expand Homeless not Toothless to include providing free medical and dental care for the 28,000 children currently in the Los Angeles Foster Care Programs. Dr. Grossman is currently in his second year on Team.
Having declared wanting to do this new expansive project, he knew he could not do it alone. One of the things he mastered in the first year of Teamwas how to powerfully share and create opportunity so that someone would want to take an active role in his project. Dr. Grossman reached out to celebrities in the community. Sharon Stone is an active member of the board. Felicity Huffman and Bill Macy appear at special events and speak publicly to gather attention from the media. Many other celebrities came together to throw a huge gala fundraiser, one of the outcomes being the donation from Los Angeles County of an entire building, which is being used to create offices. Dr. Grossman’s team is responsible for staffing the doctors, dentists, and medical supplies. These professionals are not working for profit, and have their own teams of assistants.
All the while, Dr. Grossman is still the owner and a practicing dentist in his own office, where he works twenty hours a week and confidently lets the office team manage the rest. His practice wasn’t always this free and easy. Between his first and second year in the Team program, he was involved in a serious auto collision. The accident took him away not only from his project, but also from his dentistry practice for a year and a half. Thanks to the distinctions he learned on Team, Dr. Grossman’s practice continued to flourish. “Now I’m in a place where I’m clear that it’s going to powerful with or without me.”
Dr. Grossman is looking to raise a million dollars, and open the doors to his newest dental clinic in February 2013. He produces powerful results in his own practice, three businesses that he is either CEO or President of, plus running the non-profit Homeless not Toothless. He has learned to take on multiple businesses and manage them with minimal breakdowns. On how he runs five corporations having three to over a hundred team members, he says: “I can’t say it’s always easy but I’m clear there’s always a solution to get out of it…and to me that is one of the biggest breakthroughs, the ability to deal with whatever the gap is that I’m playing for in a powerful way that doesn’t slow me down.”
For more information on how you can participate, visit the website www.homelessnottoothless.org
Interview by Kimchi Chow, Team San Jose
Written by Lindsay Tappero, San Jose Alumna and
Mike Pettingale, Los Angeles
