Foundation President’s Message

BY Dr. Donald C. Schmitt, Foundation President

It is my honor to serve as the current President of the CSPD Foundation.  First and foremost, I want to thank Mr. Steve Gross for his years of tireless dedication to the Foundation.  Steve has given very generously to the Foundation and to the CSPD with his heart, his time and his wallet.  During my transition he has been a consistent source of ideas and support.  Congratulations Steve on a highly successful tenure with the Foundation and best wishes on a well-deserved retirement from SML.  Hopefully much of your time will now be spent on the beaches of Kauai, trusty metal detector in hand!

The Foundation has been very active during these unprecedented pandemic times.  Under the wise guidance of our Treasurer Dr. Ken Syzmanski, the Foundation has built a corpus designed to help weather emergency situations such as the world is currently facing.  As many of you know, the costs of seeing patients safely during this time has gone up considerably.  Our graduate programs face even higher costs than most private practitioners due to University and public health requirements.  Past President and current Foundation Trustee Dr. Mark Lisagor was deeply concerned about the ability of programs to reopen and provide care for their underserved patient population; not to mention the needed patient experience for their residents.  Dr. Lisagor suggested that the Foundation dip into our corpus and provide sizable grants to the California training programs.  The rest of the Foundation board enthusiastically agreed, and I am proud to announce that the Foundation recently made one-time grants of $25,000 to each of the 5 programs (UCLA, USC, UCSF, Loma Linda, and NYU Langone San Diego).  As you can imagine these grants were much appreciated by the schools.  In the words of Ray Stewart the UCSF program director, “The CSPD Foundation’s very thoughtful and timely grant to assist our COVID19 recovery efforts was truly a “Godsend”…..to maintain many of our clinical activities by giving us the resources to purchase adequate PPE supplies to enable a resumption of our non-emergency clinical and teaching activities. This wonderful gesture has been critical to our ability to maintain a course of financial viability and sustainability.”

In addition to grants to the training programs, the Foundation believed it was equally important to assist CSPD during these difficult times.  Therefore, the Foundation has made a $25,000 one-time grant to CSPD to underwrite the transition to a new Online Continuing Education platform.  This new platform will allow CSPD to much more quickly place recorded lectures online.  During this pandemic, OCE has become a crucial avenue for our members to maintain their licensure and expand their knowledge base.   

Moving forward, the Foundation is looking at ways to assist RDA training programs and to partnering with CSPD on providing more CE opportunities for dental staff members.  We are also continuing to work on our social media presence to reach out to more members.  Our newest trustee Dr. Neek LaMantia (and new mom… Congratulations Neek!) is heading up our social media effort.  In addition to Neek, Dr. Ora Lowe has joined the Foundation as Vice President (where does she find the time?…she must not sleep!) The Foundation is looking to recruit more corporate participation to increase our base as well.

Thank you to all of you who support the Foundation.  None of these efforts would be possible without your continued donations.  If you have any questions about or ideas for the Foundation, please reach out to me. Be safe and healthy!

Don
dschmitt425@gmail.com