The Foundation will provide a grant totaling $150,000 to the Kansas Dental Association and the Kansas Dental Charitable Foundation to assist in funding the Kansas Initiative for New Dentists (KIND) program. Through this loan repayment program, KIND will focus on bringing dental care to sparsely populated areas of Kansas which were identified by the state as underserved. The program will use data provided by the Department of Health and Environment of Oral Health, which designates areas of the state as “dental deserts”, to guide the loan repayments and grants made under the program to attract dentists to these key areas. Over the next three years the KIND program hopes to place six to nine dentists in rural Kansas to provide dental care to these underserved areas, which include communities such as Greensburg, Medicine Lodge, Coldwater, Sublette, Satanta, Ness City, Sharon Springs and many others. In addition to providing financial support for these future dentists, the KIND program will work with local communities to determine other opportunities for support to make the recruitment efforts successful. The KIND program will target students enrolled in regional dental schools.