To understand how families escape poverty, you have to look at the barriers that stand between them and opportunity.
That’s why eye care isn’t just healthcare, it’s one of the smartest economic investments we can make. In more than 20 years of evaluating global health interventions, I’ve seen few solutions deliver such immediate returns for families while improving health, education, and livelihoods.
Continue readingEarlier this month, we shared a bold vision: What if, together, we could bring permanent, life-changing eye care to over 2 million people?
And together, we are doing just that! Thanks to your incredible generosity, along with other Seva donors, we met the $250,000 match challenge, unlocking a total of $500,000 to launch 26 new Vision Centers worldwide, bringing eye care to the doorsteps of millions.
Continue reading“It would be wonderful to regain my eyesight. I would like to give back to my family for all of this.”
These words belong to Oscar Rios, a 62-year-old proud father from Paraguay. For decades, Oscar was the person his family leaned on. When cataracts stole his sight, everything changed. Because a routine surgery was out of financial reach, he spent a full year in total blindness.
Oscar didn’t just miss the light. More than anything, he missed being the pillar his family could count on, instead of having to rely on them to get by day to day.
You didn’t let his story end in the dark.
Continue readingOutside Kampot, Cambodia, Chan rides his bike, collecting discarded bottles to earn income to support himself and his six grandchildren. Before surgery, failing vision made the work exhausting and dangerous. He relied on his grandchildren for help, even as he carried the responsibility of keeping the family going.
Thank you for helping us celebrate Wavy’s 90th birthday in support of Seva Foundation. To those of you who were there in the room, and those who joined us in spirit, we offer our heartfelt gratitude.
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Something has shifted. After decades of restoring sight – one surgery, one pair of glasses, one village at a time, Seva has crossed a threshold and I want you to be the first to understand what that means.
The research coming out of Guatemala this year stopped me cold. When we gave coffee harvesters eyeglasses, productivity jumped 8% within days. Every dollar spent returned $30 in combined wages and farm income. That result didn’t come from a new technology or a capital campaign. It came from a systems approach we have been quietly perfecting for 47 years; the disciplined belief that if you build the right infrastructure, train the right people, and measure what actually matters, the returns compound in ways that surprise even us.
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Nine-year-old Sarun lives in Puok, a district in Siem Reap where the light is bright and unfiltered, and where childhood is stitched together from schoolbooks, cousins, and the long absence of parents working far away.
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The study has a name only an academic could love: Refractive error correction and harvest worker productivity in the Guatemalan coffee sector: A quasi-experimental analysis. It’s a mouthful. For this newsletter let’s call it Glasses for Guatemalan Harvesters.
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For more than 25 years, Seva Foundation has been steadily changing the view in Cambodia. Since 1999, Seva’s long-term partnerships with national ministries, hospitals, and local nonprofits have helped reduce the country’s blindness rate from 1.2% to just 0.37%.
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When we picture sight being restored, we imagine the big moment: a bandage lifted, a face coming into focus. What we don’t picture is the “Air Puff” machine quietly doing its job without protest. In eye care, that’s its own kind of miracle.
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