MAKING FACES
...is an outstanding non-profit organization based in Canada that has as its mission helping children with facial differences.  Look at some of the great work they're doing:

Michael Williams-Stark can remember at a young age his mother holding him up in front of the medicine cabinet mirror and explaining to him how he was different.

She would point to the facial differences resulting from his cleft lip and pallet: the scars above his lip and slightly asymmetrical nose.

“But she did it in a way that made me feel unique and special,” Stark said.

Not everyone was as loving as his mother, however, and growing up with a facial difference wasn’t easy. There was teasing and name calling, insecurity and emotional repercussions from having a face that others labeled as different.

“I think for a while I was a pretty tough, hard-to-get-to guy, or at least I tried to be,” he said. “I didn’t like people that much, they were just instruments of cruelty.”

Now in his 50s, Stark, who lives in South Parkdale, sees his facial difference as a gift.

“I will always see the world through the eyes of that little boy, but at the same time I think it makes the successes all the sweeter because you know what you have gone through to get there.”

It made him empathetic, gave him the drive to chase down his dreams in music, acting, voice work and most importantly creating an avenue to help children and youth living with facial differences of their own.

Stark is the founder of Making Faces, a non-profit organization that helps children with facial differences. He has created a series of improvisational workshops specifically designed for children with facial differences that teach them acting skills and improv games to both build confidence and develop important life skills.

Improve comedy is the perfect way to help because it addresses skills people with facial differences sometimes lack, he said.

“We hate to make eye contact...and we don’t like to use our voices often,” Stark said. “You can’t get through an improve sketch without speaking or making eye contact with the other actors.”

Eighty percent of the youth he works with have a cleft lip and/or pallet; the remainder are young people who are born with or acquire a facial difference through an accident. Stark also does workshops with speech pathologists, social workers and teachers.

“I just don’t want them to be as lonely or isolated as I was,” he said. “I can’t take care of all that, obviously, but I can help give them the tools to be more independent and assertive with what they want.”

Participants practice eye contact, voice projection, public speaking and creative storytelling and are encouraged to use their voices and express themselves in a fun, creative and safe environment.

The workshops also offer the opportunity for children to meet other children with facial differences and provide a safe, caring environment where they can discuss differences, teasing and related issues, which Stark knows all too well.

Stark was born in 1955 in British Columbia with the worst bilateral cleft lip and pallet case doctors had seen up to that point .

He had more than a dozen surgeries to repair the pallet, reconstructive facial surgeries, bone graphs, a deviated septum rebuilt and more.

In spite of that, Stark ended up majoring in theatre at Douglas College in New Westminster, B.C., and becoming a voice-over actor and a musician.

“Not that I am particularly brave or anything, those were just the things I was interested in and I realized early on that these are the cards I have been dealt, so if I am going to live a fulfilled life I’m going to have to suck it up.”

He moved to Toronto in 1984 and started creating character voices, which were featured, on the ‘Super Mario Brothers’ and ‘Beetlejuice’ cartoons, among others.

“But I never dealt with my facial difference at all, I never talked about it,” he said.

Back in the mid-1990s, while watching a documentary on facial differences with a friend, she suggested Stark should be working with children.

“She said, “Don’t you think you should be working with kids like that? Wouldn’t it have meant a lot to you when you were a kid to meet an adult like you?,” Stark recalled.

He found it sage advice, and started doing workshops using acting, theatre and improv games with About Face, a North York organization that promotes and enhances the emotional and mental well-being of individuals with facial differences.

“They were such a hit that I was asked to come to SickKids and teach there,” Stark said. He did workshops at the hospital for five or six years before deciding to apply for charitable status for Making Faces in 2004.

There is no charge for the workshops and Stark said his dream is that Making Faces will either find government backing or a sponsor to help him focus on the charity and ensure it goes on after he isn’t able to do it anymore.

He said he is looking at getting a space to host regular weekly workshops and start leadership training so his older students can learn to teach workshops.

“I would just like to see this thing take off and kids like us get some encouragement and support,” Stark said.

Stark said there is a new Making Faces executive director and they are looking at launching new programming this summer.

He also hopes Making Faces will be able to travel to the places he has been asked to go such as across Canada, into the United States as well as Indonesia and the Philippines."

"Sometimes our light goes out but is blown into flame by another human being.  Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light."--Albert Schweitzer