Hi, this is Chris Bentson, and it's time for another reSource Minute.
Happy holidays and wishing you a great start to next year as we close out this year. Today's reSource Minute is about giving back to the profession of orthodontics. I want to encourage you to maybe look at the AAOF as an option. This is our mission statement.
I've gotten a chance to lead the group, right now, and I've been a board member for five years. We are basically the charitable arm of the AAOF. We also do donated orthodontic services and disaster relief - so you may know some about it. I want to show you a little bit about what we've done.
Since inception, we've given over $15 million in research grants to academics and universities that are in North America. You can see, on this chart, how that's played out. We provide a lot of academic seed research money to get their research started, many of which have gone on to reserve NIH grants and others - so it's a way to help the specialty in the academic world continue to produce research that's relevant for the orthodontic society.
You can give at any stage of your career in orthodontics for the residents. We have a Vanguard kind of pledge program where you can start giving as little as $5 a month, and you can complete your pledge in the early years, as you begin to make more money. For your mid-career doctors, you can join the Regent Society, which is basically a pledge to give $25,000 and complete that in the mid part of your career. As you get to later in your career, we would encourage you to entertain the idea of the Keystone Society, which is to include the AAOF in some small way as part of your estate plan. Any of those are great ideas and they can be done at any time in your career. Or you can make a one-time just gift to the AAOF.
There are a number of ways to give everything from named awards after people that have meant a lot to you, you can get a group together to name an award. You can just make a one-time gift, you can have staff people make a gift, or you can go on Amazon Smile and make a gift.
You can see the various ways here that you can give to the AAOF. And so I would ask you to take a picture of this screen, choose to donate by the end of the year or sometime next year, or a pledge, or even a one-time gift sometime in the near term to give back to the specialty that you're a part of and give so much to you. I hope that you have a great end of the year and Happy New Year to each of you.
That's the reSource Minute. We thought you'd want to know.
