A 17-year-old from Milpitas has turned a single interview with a dying Navy veteran into a nonprofit that has now delivered more than $100,000 in free dental care to veterans across the Bay Area. Sanaah Pande founded HopeWorks to cover exactly the kind of costly, high-value procedures — dental implants, root canals, crowns — that are notoriously hard to access without insurance, and that the Department of Veterans Affairs generally does not cover for most of the veterans it serves.
According to The Milpitas Beat, Pande is now a senior at a Monterey high school and runs HopeWorks with a team of volunteers, recruiting the dentists herself. The nonprofit is based in Milpitas but serves veterans throughout the Bay Area, and it launched more than a year and a half before the outlet's report. Pande grew up in a military family — her mother serves in the U.S. Air Force Reserve, her grandfather served as an officer in the Indian Army, and her second great-grandfather served in World War I as part of the British Imperial Army.
An Interview That Never Led to Treatment
The idea for HopeWorks traces back to an interview Pande conducted in eighth grade with Rafael Garcia, a 100-year-old veteran who served in the Navy. Garcia told her he had experienced severe tooth pain while at sea in the Pacific, with no access to dental care aboard his ship. By the time Pande spoke with him, his daughter — then in her seventies — had become his main caretaker, and Garcia's wheelchair could not even pass through his own home's doorframe. He couldn't afford to have it widened. Garcia died before HopeWorks was founded, according to the same account, meaning he never received the help Pande went on to build an organization around.
Pande has said veterans deserve support after their sacrifices, and that HopeWorks can go all over the Bay Area — including visiting the homes of veterans who are unable to attend its events. The nonprofit now has a mobile dental office to make that possible. Pande also interned at Milpitas Smile Design, the practice where HopeWorks held its most recent event, where three dentists donated their time to perform implants and crowns for five veterans at no cost, providing roughly $15,000 worth of services in a single sitting.
Why the Gap Exists
The need HopeWorks is trying to fill is a structural one. Full VA outpatient dental coverage is largely restricted to veterans who are 100% disabled, former prisoners of war, or those with service-connected dental injuries, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. As a result, roughly 75% of the 9 million veterans enrolled in VA health care are ineligible for those outpatient dental benefits, according to an August report from Military.com. That leaves the vast majority of enrolled veterans facing full out-of-pocket costs for exactly the procedures HopeWorks targets.
Those costs are especially steep in California. A single dental implant with an abutment and crown runs between $4,013 and $8,026 statewide as of June, with Bay Area prices reaching as high as $7,500, per Real Dental Costs — making California the most expensive state in the country for the procedure. For a veteran living on a fixed income, that single fix can be out of reach entirely without a program like HopeWorks stepping in.
More Than a Cosmetic Fix
The stakes go beyond comfort. Veterans experience tooth decay at rates over 60% higher than non-veterans, and untreated periodontal disease has been linked to serious systemic health problems including cardiovascular disease, bacterial pneumonia, and stroke, according to clinical research cited in the Federal Register. VA research also finds that dental care consistently ranks among the top three unmet needs for homeless veterans, alongside housing and childcare, and that receiving dental treatment increases a veteran's odds of securing employment or financial stability by 14%.
The American Dental Association has pointed to similar stakes on a national scale, noting that oral health problems contribute to work productivity loss for nearly 600,000 U.S. veterans every year. The VA itself leaned harder on private providers to close the gap in Fiscal Year 2025, delivering more than 3.5 million dental procedures through community care partners. Congress has also taken notice: the Dental Care for Veterans Act, introduced this year with backing from major veterans service organizations, would phase in comprehensive VA dental coverage over four years for millions of currently excluded veterans.
A Strategic Base in Santa Clara County
HopeWorks' choice of Milpitas as a home base isn't incidental. Santa Clara County holds the largest total veteran population among Bay Area counties, according to U.S. Census Bureau data analyzed by KQED. The county has also made real progress on veteran homelessness specifically, recording a 21% drop in homeless veterans between 2023 and January 2025 — down to 378 individuals, its lowest count in two decades — through coordinated local housing and support efforts reported by San José Spotlight.
HopeWorks' lead dentist, Dr. Puneet Sandhu, oversees the complex clinical care delivered by the nonprofit's volunteer dentists. The organization has served around 50 veterans to date and hopes to help roughly 200 this year, with plans to expand into supporting veterans' broader financial needs as well. For Pande, the mission still traces back to the veteran she couldn't help in time — and the ones she's determined not to let fall through the same cracks.
