Collaborating with existing non-profits, we meet children with clubfoot and their families where they are to improve their lives with a unique treatment method. Our goal is to provide compassionate relief and assistance to those suffering from clubfoot regardless of race, ethnicity, location, socioeconomic background or religion.
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We work with existing non-profit organizations treating clubfoot around the world. Our aim is to utilize existing resources to bring an improved treatment method to areas where it can have the greatest benefit.
Clubfoot is fully treatable but, in many developing areas, access to care, compliance, and affordability are huge barriers. We hope to decrease the magnitude of the roadblocks and provide an alternative that is more readily accepted by the familes using it.
Our Bracing Treatment
Jerald Cunningham, a board certified Prosthetist and Orthotist, has spent the past 15 years developing an alternative method of bracing called the Cunningham Clubfoot Brace (also known as the Dynamic Torsional Knee Ankle Foot Orthosis or DTKAFO).
Although the Children's Clubfoot Collaborative only became a certified 501(c)(3) non-profit in 2018, our family has been working to improve access to this treatment for years. We've traveled to Kenya multiple times, and have worked with teams in the United States, the United Kingdom and France to disseminate information about the treatment. Patients have also traveled from all over the world to Maine to receive treatment with the Cunningham bracing method.
The bracing and treatment protocol that we have been training others in has been refined and perfected over the course of 15 years.
We have traveled to Kenya multiple times, as well as working directly with a provider in the United Kingdom to bring this method to families around the world.
So far, we have treated over five hundred children with clubfoot - a number that we hope to see grow exponentially soon.
Get involved and help Children's Clubfoot Collaborative reach our goals. We are currently working to ship a dozen braces each month to CURE's Kijabe hospital. Once the hospital has a sufficient amount of braces, we hope to broaden our fundraising goals to include facilitating onsite 3D printing of the brace, injection molding and developing further educational resources - with a bold, long-term goal to expand access to the treatment to the vast number of under-served areas in the world where children with clubfoot are being born.
Families who are using our bracing system can return their outgrown braces to Cunningham Prosthetic Care. We will collect and forward these braces to help another family whose child was born with clubfoot.
We knew from the beginning that this brace had enormous potential in treating clubfoot in underserved communities. 90% of the children born with clubfoot every year are in countries with limited or no access to treatment. That’s 158,000 children this year. By sharing our story you can help us to deliver education and our clubfoot braces to these children.
Our current aim is to raise $50,000 to reach over one hundred babies around the globe with accessible treatment. This funding will be directly providing support, through training, guidance, braces and materials, to CURE’s hospital in Kijabe, Kenya while they continue to ramp up use of the brace in a long term study.
