Set Up a Charity to Help Your Community and Business by Rachael Dilley

by Rachel Dilley

Town Hall Dental owner Dr Imran Rangzeb and I have a history of being involved with charity work. In the past I’ve been a mentor at my local job centre and have worked with people with mental health issues.

We’ve always been a community-minded business and have actively looked for groups such as our local hospice to work with. We set up The Town Hall Foundation this past May after working with a local homeless charity, which has unfortunately now closed, to offer preventative dentistry.

We wanted to carry on with the work we’d started, so the foundation became the official sponsors for another charity called Focus4Hope, where we go out to the cities of West Yorkshire and offer pop-up dental clinics for those in need. We hand out food packs and hygiene packs, and anyone who needs additional dental treatment is invited back to the practice for us to carry out the work there.

We know that oral hygiene can be one of the lowest priorities when you don’t have a roof over your head—but it also has a huge impact on your self-confidence and dignity.

Through spending time with our local homeless community, we learned about the desperate need there is for support for people on the streets at every level—not just in terms of their oral health—and that a lot of these issues are interlinked.

We can’t stop our mission at just providing hygiene services. People need education, financial stability and so much more to help them be less vulnerable.

To that end, we created a community company Focus4Success, which aims to educate people who are struggling to get back into work and to be successful. Our strapline is ‘Achieving Success Together’. We are passionate about everyone having a right to be successful and fulfil their dreams.

We’ll continue to offer dental care and food through the Town Hall Foundation, and combined with Focus4Success we’re hoping we can offer long-term rehabilitation and support across a range of areas.

Our long-term vision is to create a centre where someone who is at the lowest point in their life can go to and come out with their head held high and the skills to manage their own life.

Undoubtedly our patients and the practice remain at the forefront of our minds and our priority, but the charitable work we do has a knock-on effect for the practice because the patients feel incredibly proud that they are part of a place that is trying to make a difference.

We won a Best Patient Care award at the practice and for us, they are two sides of the same coin. Caring for people whether they are our patients or individuals at their most vulnerable.

A business can choose to operate on their own or become an integral part of their community.

We’ve chosen the latter and the community have rallied in their support for us.

Our work in the community has helped us out in more ways than our relationship with our patients. We’re regularly featured in the press for the work that we do, which from a commercial point of view is both an advert for our charity work but also our practice.

In addition, we’ve created great ties with the local business community through fundraising and charitable events and our referrals have increased in tandem with our reputation locally.

If any practice owners or managers are thinking of setting up a charity or a community group, I would suggest you think about how you want to make a difference, what your local community needs and what area do you want to make a difference in?

Then start getting in touch with other charities and your local Voluntary Action Group to see how they can help, or if you can work together.

If you’re active on social media it’s worthwhile putting a post on LinkedIn about your plans and you’ll be surprised at how many people offer their help.

It’s amazing to be able to put a smile on someone’s face. This is why many of us got into dentistry after all, but to do that in a different way for someone in so much need is a whole different feeling. If everyone can give free time, just an hour a week would make the world a better place and we’d build a much brighter future.

If you’d like to support Town Hall Dental’s charity efforts, or want more advice on how to increase your own charity work, please email Rachel@townhalldental.co.uk.