Click to buy Before and After by Brian F. Mullaney, Co-Founder of Smile Train and WonderWork.
Before and After – Epilogue: Maura Again
As I write this, in May 2016, WonderWork is almost five years old.
We’ve gotten off to an incredible start, establishing more than 75 programs and partnerships in almost 50 of the world’s poorest countries.
We’ve provided tens of thousands of free surgeries for burn victims and children with clubfeet, and we’ve helped restore the eyesight of more than 125,000 blind children and adults—enough to fill every seat in one of the biggest football stadiums in America.
We continue to work to direct the flow of money from donor to patient, as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Most charities on a similar scale of impact have hundreds of employees and spend ten times as much on overhead and administration. Our team is made up of just eight people and our overhead is tiny because we know that the more efficient and cost-effective we are, the more children we’re able to help.
It really is that simple.
These days, I fervently believed it’s possible to run a highly productive and impactful non-profit, as long as you stay mission-driven, focused, and can harness the power of collective goodwill.
You need to be rooted in the same principles of efficiency that inspire good business, because this will enable you to help the most people for the smallest amount of money.
A charity needs a realistic business plan and a sound strategy. It needs to be well managed and analytical. And it needs a clear way to measure results.
This is important. The stakes are so much higher than in business. With a charity, you’re not “maximizing shareholder value”; you’re trying to change the world.
***In the process of writing this book, I’ve found myself spending a great deal of time reflecting on my work and what it means to me. Today, I’m the proud founder of an organization that helps children suffering from three medical problems: burns, blindness and clubfeet. But it was only as I was researching the book that I rediscovered a folder that my dad had kept, filled with letters chronicling my parents’ tireless efforts to save my sister Maura. Some of these letters describe the time she was admitted into a burn ward because her temperature had gotten so high it burned her body inside and out. Others discuss the damage to her eyes that made her legally blind. Still others record her alarming weight loss as her health worsened, until she could barely walk and had to be pushed around in a wheelchair.
It was only as I was digging through these old papers that I connected the dots. My sister’s fever burned her body; WonderWork takes care of burn victims. My sister had to use a wheelchair because she too weak to walk; WonderWork provides treatment to cure clubfoot. My sister lost her eyesight; WonderWork enables surgeons to restores eyesight to blind children.
I’d like to say that this convergence of my work and my personal history was intentional on my part—but that wouldn’t be true. We chose to focus on these three types of surgeries after conducting market research to determine how we could do the most good for the greatest number of people.
It was all serendipity.
And yet there is no doubt that Maura, and her enduring spirit, have had a profound impact on my life.
After Maura died, my entire worldview shifted. Growing up, as an Irish Catholic kid, I’d always been told about the parable of the Good Samaritan.
You know the story: a traveler in a strange land is beaten, stripped of his clothing, and left bleeding by the side of the road. A priest comes by, but he keeps walking. Another man passes, but he also walks by. Then the Good Samaritan comes along, and he stops to help the stranger.
Of course, the story is meant to illustrate that we should all be more compassionate to our fellow man. But for a small child, the figure of the Good Samaritan ended up in same category as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. He was a make-believe character from a fairy tale.
After Maura died, I stopped believing in the Good Samaritan altogether (just as surely as I’d given up believing that a man with a white beard and a red suit delivered the gifts at Christmas.) My sister had been lying broken and bleeding by the side of the road, but no one could come to her rescue because there was nothing anyone could do.
After that, I wised up. I knew you had to look after yourself in life. There weren’t any rules. Any day your number might be up, so you had live life on your own terms. I became closed-off, colder, more cynical—because this was the lesson I had thought life had taught me.
My mom was the first one to point this out to me, and to warn me about what might happen to me as a result. Then, after I started traveling in the developing world, my perspective changed dramatically.
On my travels I met so many extraordinary and selfless doctors who gave up lives of comfort and security to help the poor. I met real life Good Samaritans, like the Chuanhui family living in a cave in China, who took in an abandoned baby with a cleft even though they couldn’t afford one more mouth to feed, or Juliette in Togo, who adopted the little blind girl she found sleeping on her doorstep.
I spent over two decades raising hundreds of millions of dollars in donations, some of them from very wealthy people, but the vast majority of them from people who had very little.
People on fixed incomes, people who were sick, who had been laid off from their jobs, even some who were in prison. I’ve learned that the most generous people on earth aren’t wealthy or powerful—they’re people who have very little, who may be suffering themselves, but who still extend a hand to help others.
Thanks to this work, I have learned so much about kindness, compassion, and selflessness—and the good deeds that go far beyond writing a check.
These real-life Good Samaritans have laid a new moral foundation for how I want to live. I know I’d never be noble enough to give up my first-world comforts to go to live in a developing country like so many of the doctors I’ve met over the years. But I can align myself with goodness wherever I see it and work as hard as I can to increase the sum of its impact.
Every time we switch on our phones, or turn on the TV, or open the papers, we’re bombarded with everything that’s wrong with the world. And this leaves us with a choice: We can retreat into cynicism and defeatism, saying, “That’s the way the world is—there’s nothing I can do,” or we can repeatedly and emphatically strive to make our own contribution, however small, to improving life for others and for future generations.
These days, I no longer think of doing-good as an obligation. Instead, it’s what drives me and gets me out of bed in the morning. My path from Madison Avenue to this point has taken me on a 180-degree trajectory.
In my thirties, no one loved money or luxuriated in the good life more than I did. Now in my fifties I make a fraction of the salary I used to make, but I am ten times happier. I could have very easily stayed in advertising and made more money, but I decided to travel this path, not out of a sense of duty, but because I have found this work to be the most compelling, challenging, and satisfying work I can imagine.
On some level, we all have a similar choice to make. On a daily basis, we can decide whether we want to be givers or takers. We can keep taking and end up running on empty, as I did during my days on Madison Avenue.
Or we can chose to give—and receive so much fulfillment in return. Because no matter how much money you make, no matter how famous or successful you become, everyone gets to the point where when he realizes how lucky he is to receive this life.
You know, the day when you ask yourself:
Did my life matter? Did I make a difference?
Over the past 25 years I’ve learned that it’s never too early to ask these questions.
And it’s never too late to change the answers.
When I first came on board as interim president of Smile Train, my daughter Maura was seven months old. Now she’s fifteen, smart as a whip and already thinking about which college she’d like to attend.
As I was finishing up work on this book, out of the blue, my daughter came to me and asked me about our progress with the hospital in Varanasi.
“Dad,” she said, “when do you think that the new burn hospital will be finished?”
I told Maura that we were trying to build the hospital as soon as possible because the need was so great. We hoped to be able to open the doors in 2017.
“Why do you ask?” I wanted to know. “You want to come for the grand opening? We’re probably going to have a big party with elephants and everything.”
“No dad,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking about the opening…”
I sighed inwardly. My daughter’s a great kid, but like most teenagers, she’s usually more interested in her friends, her Snapchat, and her social life than what’s happening on the other side of the world.
I’ve never wanted to force my kids to get involved in my charity work out of some sort of sense of duty. Sure, I wanted to instill principles of compassion and kindness in them—just as my mom did for me—but beyond that, I’ve always wanted to let them find their own way, in their own time.
Then Maura told me something that blew me away:
“I was thinking that I would like to go and work for Subodh the summer before I go to college,” she said.
I looked at my daughter, my sweet girl named for my sweet sister, and I smiled.
“I’m sure we might be able to arrange that,” I told her. “I think it would be an incredible experience.”
Click to buy Before and After by Brian F. Mullaney, Co-Founder of Smile Train and WonderWork.
