Stephanie Quayle Wins “Smile Award” at Operation Smile Fundraising Event
March 3, 2015 – Rebel Engine recording artist Stephanie Quayle participated in the 7th Annual “Dancing With the Carolina Stars” in Greensboro, NC raising over $42,000 to benefit Operation Smile Carolinas Chapter. She won the “Smile Award,” which goes to the dancer that raised the most money because it will go towards funding over 175 surgeries for children with clef palates and clef lips. The total monies raised by all of the participating sponsors exceeded $250,000.
In between being in the studio working on her upcoming new album Meant For You and raising funds for Operation Smile, Stephanie trained with professional dancer Gregory Mishura performing a swing style ballroom dance. Prior to the night of the event she had raised over $13,000 online and the rest was raised after her musical performance and dance at the event. Funds came from several sources including a little girl donating her tooth fairy money and High Point University students rallying to raise $1,000 for the event.
Operation Smile is an international children’s medical charity that performs safe, effective cleft lip and cleft palate surgery, and delivers postoperative and ongoing medical therapies to children in low and middle income countries. Every three minutes a child is born with a cleft. A child with a cleft has twice the odds of dying before their first birthday. Children with cleft conditions who survive may have difficulty eating, speaking, hearing or breathing properly. In some places, they are shunned and rejected. And in too many cases, their parents can’t afford the surgeries they need to live a productive life. That’s where we come in as the largest volunteer-based children’s medical charity providing free cleft surgeries. Since 1982, Operation Smile — through the help of dedicated medical volunteers — has provided 220,000 free surgical procedures for children and young adults. Our work creates a lasting global impact. We train local medical professionals in developing countries and strengthen healthcare systems so more children in some of the poorest areas in the world can be treated.
Stephanie is coming off a career high 2014 and still made time for helping raise money and awareness for causes and charities she is passionate about. The singer/songwriter received two prestigious Blue Ocean Film Festival Award nominations for a song “Big Blue Town” she wrote and donated to the Sea Save Foundation which raises awareness and money for the urgent problems facing marine ecosystems including shark finning and illegal fishing. In October, Quayle returned to her hometown of Bozeman for the 2nd Annual Stephanie Quayle Homecoming Concert which brought in over five truck loads of food for the local Food Bank to prepare them for the increased needs of the community during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday season. In June, Stephanie participated in her first Mounted Shoot competition “Shoot Against Cancer” for the Bozeman 3 Foundation which helped provide financial assistance to local kids for treatment of cancer who must travel out of the area for treatments. Stephanie took the event seriously. Having never competed in Mounted Shooting before, she spent 3-4 months training with professional mounted shooters in Nashville.
Also, in 2014 the rising singer/songwriter released her single “Sugar High,” which was produced by Grammy-winning Ilya Toshinsky and written by three of Nashville’s most award-winning revered songwriters Ashley Gorley (Carrie Underwood’s “Good Girl,” Luke Bryan’s “Crash My Party”) Kelley Lovelace (Brad Paisley’s “He Didn’t Have To Be,” “Ticks”) and Steve McEwan (Kenny Chesney’s “Summertime,” Keith Urban’s “Only You Can Love Me This Way”).
Stephanie is currently in the studio working on new music for an album and single expected to be released in 2015.
SOURCE: Stephanie Quayle