When Mikey and Marcus Kang looked beyond their own household, they realized something they had always taken for granted: a toothbrush, toothpaste and access to basic oral health education wasn’t available to every child.
“As the children of dentists, we’ve always had access to oral healthcare resources and education. As we’ve grown older and noticed that not everyone has this same access, we knew we needed to do something to help out.”
The brothers, who attend Newport High School in Bellevue, started the Bright Start Initiative. It’s a student-led nonprofit that provides free dental care kits to elementary school students while offering multilingual educational resources.
During the 2025-26 school year, Bright Start distributed 6,880 dental kits to K-5 students across Washington. Now, the organization wants to go nationwide and its goal is to donate 25,000 kits across the country during the coming school year.
Through a partnership with Project Umbrella, Bright Start also donates about 300 dental kits each month to unhoused people in Seattle, Austin, New York City and Phoenix.
Each kit includes a toothbrush, toothpaste and dental floss. The nonprofit also provides schools with oral health presentations and offers educational materials online in 18 languages, including Korean, Mandarin, Cambodian, Japanese and Vietnamese.
For the Kang brothers, making those resources multilingual was personal.
“Much of our family are first-generation immigrants from Korea, so we understood the language barrier that many families face in their oral health literacy,” they said. “No one should be unable to access oral health literacy because of the language they speak at home.”
Mikey, a senior, serves as student body president and participates in DECA, golf and wrestling. Marcus, a junior, is a member of the school’s golf team and competes in junior tournaments around the country. They run Bright Start while balancing school and extracurricular activities.
Bright Start has earned praise from educators.
“Federal Way Public Schools is grateful to Bright Start for its generous donation of dental kits for our students,” Superintendent Dani Pfeiffer said in a statement. “The availability of these resources in multiple languages makes them even more accessible to the diverse families we serve.”
One anonymous parent said the donation made an immediate difference.
“Before this donation from Bright Start, I had been unable to supply my daughter with a new toothbrush for over two years,” the parent said. “Thanks to Bright Start, my daughter is using a brand new toothbrush and always smiling around the house.”
The brothers said many schools don’t respond to offers for free dental kits, making it difficult to connect with students who could benefit from the program. To expand its reach, Bright Start recently launched a Student Leader Program, inviting students across the country to volunteer as ambassadors, fundraisers and marketing interns.
The organization also partners with Delta Dental of Washington, Henry Schein Cares and local dentists, whose donations help keep the program running.
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