EYEsee Information

We are a group of young idealists with an ardent desire to fight world poverty. We firmly believe in our human mandate to provide assistance to those living in poverty. EYEsee is the result of this conviction. We understood that poor vision contributes directly to poverty in the Third World countries. Poor eyesight leads to unemployment and the inability to support a family. It keeps a person from achieving economic self-reliance. It reduces individual productivity and diminishes the quality of life. It also adversely affects the quality of education in the poorer countries. For the world's poor, eye care and eyeglasses are beyond their means. Food, shelter, medicine, and clothing take up all their meager financial resources and eyeglasses are simply held for another time when they hope to have extra income to buy them. What's anomalous about this problem is that more than 4 million eyeglasses are discarded in the U.S. each year. Despite collection efforts by large service organizations, 3 million eyeglasses remain uncollected. We feel that this is just too high a number to ignore in the context of the desperate need for eyeglasses in many parts of the world. These statistics simply confront us with the reality of the need for a more active and sustained effort to recycle used eyeglasses. EYEsee was founded in the summer of 2008 as an entirely student-run international health mission. We saw that by collecting as many eyeglasses that are being discarded in the U.S. and then partnering with international humanitarian organizations to distribute those eyeglasses to the world's poor, we can alleviate some of their poverty. We are committed to helping the world's poor experience corrected vision with recycled eyeglasses and in so doing advance their economic wellbeing. We embrace the believe that everyone has the right to see clearly.