I sent a very personal and emotional letter outlining my reasons for leaving the organization to more than a thousand Smile Train partners and employees. I explained that during my many trips to developing countries, I’d met a devastating number of children suffering from problems like hole in the heart, clubfoot, burns, and blindness. I wrote that I’d always promised myself that someday, I would find a way to help those kids. And today was that day.

I felt confident that Smile Train would continue just fine without me. There was more than enough money to keep funding cleft surgeries for many years to come. Meanwhile, I was ready to take the Smile Train model of empowering local surgeons, applying it to even bigger problems, wherever in the world there was the greatest need.

The tone of my letter was upbeat and forward focused but the reality was, I was devastated. I left Smile Train on October 13, 2010. Over the next few months, my entire senior management team also departed the organization. Many of them, including DeLois, had been with Smile Train since day one. It was as wrenching for them to go as it was for me.

The next few months were among the hardest of my life.

Throughout my career, I’d always faced setbacks and challenges. I’d gone to Los Angeles without a job after dropping out of Harvard. I’d left a safe job with a major advertising agency to start my own company working out of my living room. I’d helped to start the schools program in New York entirely from scratch—and the same had been true of Smile Train. I’d always considered myself an entrepreneur, and to be a successful entrepreneur, you have to have a very thick skin. You have to be unbelievably persistent, optimistic, and tireless. There are so many moments when you feel exhausted, depressed, and defeated, but you have to take a deep breath and say, let’s just keep going and have faith—we’ll figure it out.

But this time around, I felt different. It was tough to feel optimistic. I was fifty years old, with no severance, no job, and no office to go to in the morning. I was worried about paying the bills. Cricket and I put our house up for sale. For the first time since 1983, I didn’t have a desk in the city and I felt untethered, as if I’d completely lost my bearings.

I decided the only thing to do was to keep pressing forward, no matter how low I felt. Within weeks of leaving Smile Train, I filed incorporations paper for a new charity and started to look for seed money to get it off the ground. But the economy was still smarting from the 2008 collapse, and the stock market was in horrible shape. Donations were down to all charities. And nobody wanted to invest in something new even if I did have a compelling track record.

In those early days, I had a very positive meeting at a major foundation. They promised me one million dollars, but I hadn’t received IRS approval for my new charity yet, so I couldn’t accept their donation. When I went back to them after the IRS approval was completed, I learned they had given the money to another charity.

A few months later—in an attempt to give this new charity idea a boost—I sublet a single cubicle space in an office on 34th Street. I kept thinking of that movie Miracle on 34th Street, but the reality was I kept getting hit with disappointment after disappointment. Potential donors would say “yes,” then they would say “no.” Or they would simply say “no.” It was constantly one step forward, two steps back.

I started going to bed at 7:30 P.M. each night; I just wanted to forget all about what was happening. What if I couldn’t find the funding to get this new charity off the ground? Did I even know how to raise start-up money? When Smile Train began, it was because we already had a large donation to start the program. I had never actually raised seed money for a charity before now.

Then I got some good news. A billionaire donor in London wanted to meet with me, so I flew to London specially. I had very high hopes that the meeting would go well, as this person is extremely philanthropic, giving away hundreds of millions of dollars to charities each year. I felt confident that I could pitch him and get him on board. The fact that he even agreed to meet with me was a very good sign.

When I landed in London, it was a bitterly cold winter’s day, but I had on my biggest smile and my best suit, ready to present my case. I showed up at the foundation offices prepared for a great meeting.

“Brian Mullaney here for a 10 A.M. meeting,” I said cheerfully to the receptionist.

“Yes,” she said, tapping away at her keyboard and immediately frowning. She asked me how to spell my name.

I told her. She couldn’t find me in the system. She kept looking. Finally she said, “No, Mr. Mullaney, you have the wrong day.”

“The wrong day? No!” and I showed her the email with the date and the time. This was the right day!

Yes, it was the right day, but the billionaire’s schedule had changed and he’d had to fly somewhere and he wasn’t even in London right now. His office had sent an email to tell me this. Which, of course, I never received.

I walked out of those offices with my heart somewhere in my shoes. I had just flown to England for absolutely no reason. Here I was, worried about paying my mortgage, and I’d just wasted hundreds and hundreds of dollars on this trip and all for nothing!

I stood outside the cold, gray skies of London, wondering if this was the moment I gave up for good. Maybe it was finally time to get a normal job with a regular paycheck and forget all about starting a new charity.

I called Cricket to tell her what had happened.

“How did it go?” she asked. I could hear the excitement in her voice. She knew how much this meeting meant to me.

So I told her. That I had come all the way to London and it was the wrong day and I’d wasted all this money and I just didn’t see the point in continuing anymore.

There was a long pause on the other end of the line as Cricket took all this in. Cricket had been my savior since leaving Smile Train. She supported my decision to leave. She was always reminding me that I had done the right thing, and that my job now was to keep my focus. This wasn’t about me. This was about helping children and their families. That was my reason for getting up in the morning.

“Brian . . . calm down,” Cricket said softly. “It’s okay . . . Brian . . . He’s testing you.”

“Who’s testing me?” I asked, almost angrily.

“God,” she replied.

God? I wasn’t in the mood for God right now.

“God is testing you,” Cricket repeated. “You’ll come through this . . . stronger . . . smarter . . . better. If anyone can survive all of these setbacks and disappointments, you can. I believe in you. We all do.”

I took a deep breath, and not for the first time, thanked God for Cricket. Her words reminded me of something my mom would have said to me. I just had to pick up the pieces—the same way she taught me. That’s life, a series of setbacks and challenges, where you take a deep breath, and go on.

Raindrops began falling from the gray clouds overhead. “Can you believe this?” I asked Cricket, finally laughing at the ridiculousness of it all. “Please promise me you never tell anyone about this! This is so embarrassing . . .”

Now Cricket was laughing, too. It felt good to hear the sound, a reminder that, waiting for me at home, were people who knew me and loved me.

I got back on the airplane and returned to New York and my family.

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In the coming months, I kept knocking on doors and asking and asking. If nothing else, I had passion. I knew there were children who needed our help, I knew that there were surgeries to help them, and I knew that we had a tried and tested delivery model: empowering and funding local surgeons. I kept my energy focused. I researched, I strategized, and I continued to meet with potential funders.

Then, in January 2012, I flew to Switzerland to make a presentation to the Walter Haefner Foundation board in Zurich. Walter was the Swiss billionaire who had given us the seed money to start Smile Train. Now that he had passed away, his son and daughter, Martin and Marin, had taken over the foundation.

Martin and his wife Marianne knew our work well—they had traveled with us to China and India to see our Smile Train programs. I was tentatively hopeful, but after all my recent setbacks, I knew couldn’t get too excited. After my presentation, Martin, Marin, and the rest of the board sat there in silence, very businesslike, with impassive expressions on their faces. I couldn’t read them at all. Had I bombed? Or were they impressed? I flew back to New York without a clue.

The next day I got an email from Martin.

Dear Brian,

You will be getting a letter very soon.

And you are going to like it.

Regards,

Martin

Soon after, I received a check from the Haefner Foundation for five million dollars, more than enough to get WonderWork up and running. Martin included a note that said, “Brian, we know you really need this money so we decided to give you five years worth of grants all at once. Good luck. We believe in you.”

This was a major donation, not to mention a major relief. I immediately approached my former colleagues who had left Smile Train along with me, the folks with whom I’d built the organization: executive director DeLois Greenwood, senior manager Karen Lazarus, chief financial officer Hannah Fuchs, head of donor relations Michelle Sinesky, and Mike Schell, my former ad agency partner, who had headed up Smile Train’s marketing and design. I felt incredibly fortunate that every single one of them said yes to joining forces with me.

Almost a year to the day since I’d left Smile Train, we moved into a small office in Midtown Manhattan and got to work.

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Our first task was to figure out which medical conditions we were going to have as our main focus. We knew we wanted to tackle causes similar to clefts, problems with proven interventions that were relatively inexpensive and could be delivered easily in low-resource countries. We did a lot of research, zeroing in on the issues such as burns, curable blindness, water on the brain, clubfoot, and hole in the heart. All of these medical conditions affect millions of children all across the developing world, and the techniques and technology to treat these conditions already exist. All that was missing was the funding and training for local doctors on the ground.

After that, we did a basic market test. Yes, it would have been easy to select the problems that we thought were the most important, but we knew that it was equally important to find out how potential donors were going to react to these causes. So we did a test mailing of letters to 400,000 households describing the problems we’d researched and their impact on families around the world. When the results from the test mailings came in, it was clear that donors had responded in the greatest numbers to blindness, clubfoot, and burns. That didn’t mean we couldn’t work on additional causes in the future, but now we had a place to start.

Next, we had to find partner hospitals that could provide the surgeries we wanted to support. To cure clubfoot we needed to work with orthopedic surgeons; to help severely burned kids, we needed plastic surgeons specializing in burn injuries; and to restore eyesight to the blind, we needed ophthalmologists. Although we were familiar with cleft surgeries and plastic surgery in general, we were completely new to orthopedics and ophthalmology. We went through a painstaking period of research to track down reputable surgeons working in each of these areas in countries all around the world. Fortunately, most of the medical professionals we contacted had heard about the great success of the Smile Train program, so they were enthusiastic about the project and open to working with us.

During this time, we also had to choose a great name for our new organization. We put out a request via a crowdsourcing website, which generated thousands of names in just a couple weeks. The name we eventually selected, WonderWerk was suggested by someone in South Africa; we modified it slightly to WonderWork. None of us ever heard of it before but it’s actually a real word. The dictionary defines wonderwork as: “A marvelous or miraculous act, work, or achievement; a marvel.” We felt there was no better way to describe the miracle surgeries our doctors were going to perform.

Good Reads: Before and After by Brian F. Mullaney, Co-Founder of Smile Train and WonderWork.