Network opportunities are priceless. Tomorrow night Kevin will attend, “A Future Everyone Can See” presented by OneSight, and hosted at National Geographic’s Headquarters in Washington, DC.
Photograph by National Geographic Photographer and Pulitzer Prize Winner Stephanie Sinclair
Just last month, Kevin presented at the Unite for Sight Conference at Yale University in New Haven, CT. This opportunity provided him with ample time to meet people ranging from those working in public health in low resource nations, education, research, and vision care of course.
There he met with Maurice Huey, OneSight’s Director of Strategic Partnerships, who extended the invite to the event tomorrow night. Like GV2020, OneSight is a member of the EYElliance. With alliances like these, collaboration is becoming more common, and therefore healthcare implementors have a growing awareness of organizations like ours, and how we compliment each other.
You can see, by the article “See What Lack of Vision Care Looks Like” from National Geographic, that reaching people in rural areas of the world – the most remote areas of the world really – is extremely difficult, and ever more difficult when the organization doing the outreach provides a wide range of services.
This is where partnerships with organizations with similar goals can really make a difference – can set up big-picture plans to implement on a national and global scale. Things we ponder… How best can we work with our fellow vision care outreach organizations to reach the base of the pyramid while also lessening the burden for basic visual acuity, and act (almost) like a triage unit? How can we take some of theworkload off of organizations equipped to meet more involved vision care problems by meeting the needed of basic refractive error?
When Kevin started GV2020 his first goal was to create a solution that combined self refraction with a standard pair of eyeglasses. The USee does that. Beyond that he knew the potential for growth with other organizations doing similar work in developing nations.
As awareness of the global epidemic of blurry vision becomes more mainstream – as has happened since spring of 2018 – the opportunity to work with others has grown. This collaborative spirit is key to successfully reaching the two and a half billion people worldwide that need vision care.
Global Vision 2020 staff understand the enormity of what it is we are doing. Instead of allowing the global scale of the blurry vision epidemic to overwhelm us, we are all too excited about the partnerships we are building and the solutions we are creating through collaboration.
As always, we’ll keep you posted.
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