“Both myself and practice owner Imran Rangzeb have a history of being involved with charity work – in the past I have been a mentor at my local job centre and have worked with people with mental health issues. We’ve always been a community-minded business, and have actively looked for groups, such as our local hospice, to work with.
We set up Town Hall Foundation in May 2018 after working with a local homeless charity, that has unfortunately now closed down, to offer preventative dentistry. We wanted to carry on with the work we’d been doing, so the foundation became the official sponsors for another charity called Focus4Hope, where we go out to the cities of West Yorkshire and offer a pop-up dental clinic for those in need. At the same time, we hand out food packs and hygiene packs and anyone needing further dental treatment is invited back to the practice for us to carry out the work there. We know that oral hygiene can be one of the lowest priorities when you don’t have a roof over your head, but it also has a huge impact on your self confidence and your dignity.
Through spending time with our local homeless community, we learned about the desperate need there is for support for people on the streets at every level – not just in terms of their oral health – and that a lot of these issues are interlinked. We can’t stop our mission at providing hygiene services, people need education, financial stability and so much more to help them be less vulnerable.
