Mike Schell has been helping poor children receive surgery since 1991.
Mike was my co-founder of Schell/Mullaney which was a high tech ad agency that we started in 1990 and sold in 1996. Along the way we did a lot of pro bono work to help various charities including a surgical charity that we started in New York City called Operation Smile.
Operation Smile helped provide plastic and reconstructive surgery for underprivileged children in the New York City public school system. Mike and I paid for all the expenses and shepherded the charity through a pilot program in 89 schools which was followed by a rollout to 500 New York City schools and then a full rollout to all 1,200 New York City schools.
The program was a great success and we found hundreds and hundreds of students that needed surgery but couldn’t afford it. We talked all the major hospitals in New York City into helping us and they provided all the surgery that these kids needed for free.
We worked closely with the New York City Board of Education to implement the program through the schools.
A few years after that, Mike and I agreed to merge our charity with another charity called Operation Smile in Norfolk, Virginia.
Soon afterwards Mike and I went on several Op Smile international missions. The first one was to Gaza city for a week and that was quite an experience. It was right after Israel had turned over the Gaza Strip to the PLO. Mike and I did a lot of interviews, video and photography at the hospital.
But we also roamed around Gaza city with our interpreter and a Palestinian woman who’d just been released from Israeli prison. She served five years for trying to step to death the Israeli soldier who shot her brother to death. When we got back to New York we gave all of our photos and videos to the award-winning CBS TV show, Sunday Morning and they ran a nice piece on a medical mission.
Mike and I also traveled to Bac Thai, Vietnam which was around three hours north of Hanoi. This village had never seen Caucasians before if you can believe it. Mike and I got a lot of good photos and videos from that trip as well.
But the best thing we brought back was the idea for the Smile Train – that’s where it was born.
To pitch the idea for the Smile Train, Mike created these incredible visuals of the modern train with giant photos of children’s faces on the side of it.
He also figured out how to show the inside of these train cars where they wore operating rooms, classrooms, sleeping and eating quarters, equipment rooms, etc. and of course Mike, who was an award-winning, renowned art director, creative fantastic, friendly logo for the Smile Train.
These graphics were all that we had to pitch this idea to Charles Wang who pledged $10 million for the program, president George Herbert Walker Bush who love the idea so much you brought it to the president of China, Jiang Zemin, NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw who wrote to Bill Gates and get us a million-dollar donation and who also got us on the Today Show where more than 5 million people heard about our idea.
They say a picture is worth 1 million words. Well, Mike Schell’s pictures were worth tens of millions of dollars in startup donations.
Without Mike Schell, the Smile Train might never have happened.
When we hosted a major, black-tie Smile Train fundraising dinner in New York City for almost 1,000 people, Mike had a brilliant idea. He proposed that we use a live satellite feed to broadcast a young Chinese girl in China before dinner who was suffering with an unrepaired cleft. And then, while everyone was eating dinner, our surgeons in China would secretly operate on the girl and fix her cleft. At the end of the evening, as a surprise we would go back via a live satellite feed to China and see and talk to the young girl after the surgery she had waited nine years for.
This course was a very big idea but very risky also. What if the surgery did not go well? What if the satellite links didn’t work? What if something catastrophic happened to the girl?
Well we decided to take the chance and everything went perfectly.
The Today Show anchor Ann Curry actually interviewed smile trains very first patient, nine-year-old Wang Li, after her surgery. She was sitting on her OR table surrounded by the Chinese medical team that operated on her with a big smile on her face and her cleft completely fixed.
I’ll never forget when and said to her, “ So Wang Li, now that your cleft is fixed, you can go to school like everyone else. . Now you have a future and a second chance at life. do you have any idea what you want to be and you grow up?” And Wang Li responded, “ I want to be a doctor!” the whole ballroom overacted into tears and applause. Mike’s bold idea turned the evening into the best fund raiser ever! You can read more about it by clicking here.
Over the next almost 20 years, Mike did a tremendous amount of work designing, creating and producing much of our direct mail, collateral, advertising, photography, video for both Smile Train and WonderWork.
His talent, hard work and dedication helped us raise almost $1 billion in donations.
More importantly, Mike helped us provide more than 1 million life-changing surgeries for children no one else would help.
