You're throwing money away. And it could have helped a child.

Co-founder Leticia receiving another donation of scrap

A guest post by Mark Topley

Every day, dental practices across the UK discard something valuable.

Not accidentally. Not carelessly. Just... automatically. A crown comes off. A bridge is replaced. It goes in a pot or a bag and nobody gives it a second thought.

Those restorations contain precious metals. Gold, silver, palladium and a host of other metals. Real value. Gone.

The great shame (and opportunity) is that most practice owners and managers have no idea this is happening, and no system to do anything about it. The metals leave the building. The opportunity leaves with them.

It does not have to.

What Gold for Kids does

Gold for Kids is a charity built on a simple idea.

Collect the discarded restorations from dental practices.

Melt them down.

Convert the proceeds into funding for children's charities.

Twice a year we run a melt. The next one is at the end of July.

Practices register at goldforkids.org/register, receive everything they need to get the team informed and collections underway, and send in what they have gathered before the deadline.

That’s it.

No fundraising.

No sponsorship ask.

No awkward conversations with patients about money.

Just a redirect of something that was already leaving your practice anyway.

Gold for Kids has donated over £48,000 to trusted children's charities since it began — funding beds and refuge support for children fleeing abuse, meals through food banks and school holiday schemes, school uniforms and essentials, and trauma care and counselling for children in distress.  This is not a large corporate charity with significant overhead. It is a small, focused organisation run entirely by volunteers doing something specific and doing it well.

Why most practices won't do this

Because it requires someone to decide.

I know, it’s not a big decision. It’s no an expensive one. Just the decision to register, brief the team, and start collecting. That is the whole ask.

And yet the majority of practices will read this, think "that's a good idea," and do nothing. Not because they don't care. Because the day gets busy, the priority shifts, and nobody made it someone's job.

Now this isn’t a criticism. It is a pattern. Practice owners are good at clinical excellence and genuinely terrible at acting on things that feel optional.

This one shouldn't feel optional.

What it does for your practice

Patients notice when a practice stands for something.

When a team member can explain that the old crown being removed today will help fund support for a child in need, that is not a small moment. That is exactly the kind of thing that builds trust and differentiates you from the practice down the road.

Your team notices too. Shared purpose is not built through staff meetings. It is built through moments that mean something.

This is one of those moments. And it costs you almost nothing to create it.

The July melt is coming

Register now at goldforkids.org/register.

Brief your team this week. Start collecting. Get your patients involved.

The deadline is the end of July. What you send in before then gets melted down and turned into something that genuinely helps children.

You were going to throw it away anyway.

Mark Topley is Chair of Trustees at Gold for Kids and a leadership and performance coach working with dental practices across the UK.