Seva is a global nonprofit eye care organization that works with local communities around the world to develop self-sustaining programs that preserve and restore sight.
Since 1978, Seva has provided sight-saving surgeries, eyeglasses, medicine, and other eye care services to more than 75 million people in under-served communities.
Photo: A community health worker leads a Seva-sponsored eye screening in Nepal.
A world free from avoidable blindness requires bold ambition, meaningful partnerships, and global action. Seva Foundation is proud to support that goal, stepping forward with a commitment to reach 50 million people with essential eye care by 2030.
For Janabai, the sixth floor had become a problem.
At 65, Janabai lived in Maharashtra, India, with her grandson, his wife, and their nine-month-old daughter. The apartment was home, but getting in and out of it had become increasingly difficult. Her vision was fading, and six flights of stairs are a long way down when you can’t make out where you’re going.
Innovation can be as simple as bringing eye care closer to home. In Nepal, a modest Vision Center is helping make quality care accessible to people in rural communities.
If you’re looking for high-tech medical wizardry, complete with backup generators, sterile cleanrooms, and software engineers on speed dial, a Seva Vision Center might surprise you.
There are no titanium robotic arms or walls of blinking servers. Instead, you’ll find a trained local eye care worker, practical equipment, and a place where people can get care without traveling for hours, or even days, to reach a hospital. And that’s the innovation.
Collaboration with new colleagues at the Bengaluru workshop.
The first airplane Jharna Roy ever boarded was taking her to a workshop in Bengaluru. This was not, strictly speaking, the most important thing that happened there. But it was a good place to begin.
Starting in 2013, Jharna worked as a Community Health Promoter, educating parents, children and patients in her community. When that program ended, Jharna spent most of her working life at Pinaki Ray Eye Foundation in Malda, India, learning the hospital’s particular ways of doing things. She knew its routines, its systems, its rhythms. She knew how to run the outpatient department, manage electronic medical records, and assist in the operating theater. Then, when the hospital’s operating theater supervisor couldn’t attend a Seva workshop, Jharna was asked to go instead.
In 1967, Tom Anderson was studying at UC Berkeley when he was exposed to Eastern religions and the consciousness-expanding zeitgeist of the 60s. As a result, he found a way to travel across Asia through India and Nepal. “Deep travel like this has the power to reveal the connected humanity of people everywhere,” he said.
Back in the 1980s, Seva co-founder Mirabai Bush had an idea that was both simple and, in its way, radical: give a gift that could change someone’s life. For decades, Gifts of Sight has made it possible to give a gift that means so much more, honoring someone you love while helping bring the gift of sight and better vision to someone in need.
“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.
Outside 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.