Local Start Dental

The math behind SIDE.

A general dentist who completes our Beginner Single Implant Placement course goes home and begins placing implants for their patients. Over the next decade, they will treat hundreds of patients who would otherwise have been referred out, charged more, or simply gone without.

A dentist who completes our Extraction and Socket Preservation course goes home and provides better tooth-removal outcomes for every patient they treat for the rest of their career.

This is the part of SIDE that's hard to capture in a single number, but matters most. We can tell you how many courses we ran in 2025 (six). We can tell you how many dentists have trained with us. What we cannot easily tell you is how many patients those dentists will go on to treat with their new skills over the next ten, twenty, thirty years.

The number is large. The number is also entirely real.

When we say SIDE multiplies Local Start's impact, this is what we mean: every dentist trained becomes a different practitioner for thousands of patients we will never meet, in communities we will never directly serve.

The patients in our Durham clinic are real. The patients in those other communities are real too. SIDE is how we reach both.

Full story: https://tinyurl.com/localstart-side

One gift. One appointment. One procedure.

And then the ripple begins.

A patient who couldn't eat comfortably can now sit down to a meal with their family. Someone who had been hiding their smile in job interviews starts showing up differently. A person who spent years managing pain finally doesn't have to.

When you donate to Local Start Dental, your gift doesn't go to overhead. It becomes a procedure, a denture, an implant, an appointment for someone who had no other option. And the impact doesn't stop there. It ripples into every part of that person's life.

Since 2021, Local Start Dental has delivered $19.4 million in donated dentistry to patients from 78 of North Carolina's 100 counties.

Your gift is part of that number. And the ripple it creates is bigger than you might think.

Read how your donation becomes care at the link below.

💛 Support the work: localstartdental.org/support-us
📞 Questions? Call us: 919-569-5533

She came to Local Start Dental scared of the dentist and unhappy with her smile. She came specifically because her son was getting married, and she wanted to be able to smile in the photos.

Dr. Serag and our team completed a fixed-hybrid denture. She got the smile back, and her son got his mother fully present at his wedding.

Shortly after, she got engaged herself!

This is what restorative dentistry actually does. Not just teeth. Confidence. Presence. The willingness to say yes to your own life.

Patients come to Local Start at every level of dental anxiety, often after years of avoiding care. Some have been told their case is too complex. Some have been priced out of treatment elsewhere. Some haven't sat in a dental chair in over a decade.

None of that disqualifies anyone from care. If you or someone you know has been putting off treatment for any reason, we'd be glad to talk.

Local Start Dental does not operate in isolation.

We work alongside a network of nonprofit, healthcare, and community organizations across North Carolina, each of which shares our commitment to making care accessible:

Care Clinic of Dare, Heart Association - North Carolina, CAARE Clinic, Rescue Mission, Futuro, on Wheels Durham, Community Health Center Inc, Centro Hispano Inc, Durham, Health Services, Health Group, County Health Department NC, Health, Adams School of Dentistry, Ministries of Durham, and Smiles.

These partnerships make it possible for us to reach patients who would otherwise fall through the cracks of the traditional healthcare system. They also reflect a truth we have come to believe deeply: the dental care crisis in this country is too large for any single organization to solve.

It will take a network. We are proud of the one we are part of.

Full story: https://tinyurl.com/localstart-4years