Unite For Sight

Overview

Unite For Sight empowers communities worldwide to improve eye health and eliminate preventable blindness. Volunteer Teams work with partner eye clinics in developing countries to provide eye care and eye health education programs. Additionally, vision screening and education programs are implemented worldwide by volunteers working in ninety chapters established at universities in North America, Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Mission

To improve eye health and eliminate preventable blindness.

Program

Unite For Sight works with eye clinics worldwide that previously attempted to provide free cataract surgeries and other eye care services in their community, but have been precluded from doing so by lack of staffing and funding. Unite For Sight’s model is unique among global health and volunteer organizations in that it involves students and lay persons as support staff to eye doctors in the field, thus enabling community-based screening programs led by eye clinics without the need for paid staff. The clinic’s eye doctors diagnose and treat eye disease in the field, and surgical patients are brought to the eye clinic for surgery. The Unite For Sight-sponsored patients receive surgical care in the same facilities as those who pay. The Unite For Sight model coincides with the WHO’s Vision2020 strategy that aims to eliminate preventable blindness by the year 2020.

Impact

Unite For Sight's programs have provided eye care to more than 200,000 people thus far, including more than 4,000 sight-restoring cataract surgeries, in addition to other types of eye care to thousands more.

“The question I have always asked myself is ‘what would have happened to all these people who have benefited from Unite For Sight programs had the organization not come to their aid?’ It is likely that many would have perished in their agony." --Dr. James Clarke, Crystal Eye Clinic, Ghana

Countries of Operation

United States, Canada, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Thailand, India