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PARK CITY — Spotting celebrities is an easy thing to do in Park City, especially during the Sundance Film Festival. But this weekend, they were in town to support Operation Smile, a charity that provides surgeries for poor children suffering from cleft palates, the birth defect where kids are born with openings in their lips and in the roofs of their mouths.
Of course, one effective way to raise money and awareness for a cause is to recruit celebrities to support you, and Operation Smile's recruited a ton of them. Stars like Lance Bass, Julie Bowen and Kate Upton teamed up to help the organization.
Cleft palate is a common birth defect, which we don't often see in the U.S., because it's easily corrected with surgery. But in much of the developing world, people have no access to surgery whatsoever, causing many of the afflicted children to be social outcasts.
The celebrities competed in downhill races, but the main reason they were in town was to support Operation Smile.
"They help so many families out there," said Lance Bass, former member of N'Sync. "I mean, so many kids are born with cleft palates — they say every three minutes someone is born with this condition."
"It's an easy operation," said Julie Bowen of "Modern Family." "They can fund them so simply. You know, 250 bucks per operation. I can't think of anything that's easier than that."
"It's really not that much money to have somebody go in and have a surgery, and it takes 45 minutes," said dancer Julianne Hough.
"Two billion, no access to surgery whatsoever in this world," said Kathy Magee, a co-founder of Operation Smile. "We just take that for granted, right? So we're trying to get the message out."
Operation Smile started in 1982 and has provided surgeries for hundreds of thousands of kids in more than 60 countries. For more information, visit operationsmile.org.
