Pierre Anthian, the founder of ApprenTeeth, has been a dental technician for over 38 years.
As a humanitarian worker, he went to the Yucatan jungle, to make dental prostheses free of charges, for underprivileged Mayans. He was also a municipal councilor for the city of Laval, (a suburb of Montreal, Quebec) in Canada from 2013 to 2017; he was part of the team that overthrew a corrupt administration, denouncing their abuses.
But he is best known for founding the Montreal Homeless Choir, from 1996 to 2003, a musical group made up of homeless people; it empowered 54 of them to “Get off” the streets. No wonder that Pierre’s social activism is leading him now to democratize access to esthetic, functional and affordable dentition.
During his last professional decades, he has mainly focused on teeth and their anatomy. But not on those who wear these teeth as well as their financial vulnerabilities.
Going to the Yucatan peninsula, a Mexican approached him asking him to let the Mexicans take care of the Mexicans and rather take care of the many Canadians without teeth. That intrigued him and he did some research only to find out that according to Statistics Canada, 9% of Canadians cannot afford dentures. This increases to 16% in Quebec.