World Sight Day: today's about more than lenses
Today's about more than lenses. It's World Sight Day, and while Lenstore spends most of the year helping people see clearly, today we're thinking about the millions of people who can't. Around the world, billions of people live without the vision care they need to learn, work and simply get through the day. The OneSight EssilorLuxottica Foundation is working to change that, and this October, every Lenstore order is helping.
Vision care is easy to take for granted. And even in the UK, some of the people who need it most are the least likely to get it. That's what the OneSight EssilorLuxottica Foundation set out to change earlier this year, when it opened a free eye clinic at Central Hall in Manchester. Over 5 days in March, working alongside the Manchester Homelessness Partnership and supported by Vision Express, David Clulow, Optegra, HumanWare and Simplyhealth, the clinic saw 103 people, offering free eye examinations, prescription checks and same-day glasses to people experiencing homelessness, including refugees, families outside NHS eligibility and asylum seekers living in temporary accommodation.
Val Bayliss-Brideaux, Manchester Homelessness Partnership put it simply: ‘Vision care is one of the most overlooked aspects of health for people experiencing homelessness.’ Margarida Barata, OneSight's Europe Programmes Director added: ‘Homelessness and poor vision are both isolating. Together, they can be devastating.’
For someone sleeping in temporary accommodation, or navigating a new country without the papers or the money for an eye test, poor vision is rarely the top of the list. But it touches everything else on that list. It's harder to read a letter from the council, spot your bus number, fill in a job application or simply recognise a friend across the street. A same-day pair of glasses, handed over for free at a clinic like the one in Manchester, can undo a lot of that.
It's a pattern OneSight has seen play out across the UK before. In an earlier project, the foundation ran vision clinics across 3 UK sites specifically for asylum seekers, providing eye care to 532 people, many of whom had gone years without an eye test simply because there was nowhere for them to get one. A further clinic ran in London for people experiencing homelessness, part of the Foundation's wider mission to build, in its own words, ‘a build a global ecosystem, that expands vision care to those who need it most.
None of this happens by accident, and none of it happens for free. It takes volunteer opticians giving up their time, partners lending equipment and space, and funding to keep the clinics running. That's where this October comes in. Every eligible order placed on lenstore.co.uk this month is rounded up to the nearest 50p, on us, and the difference goes straight to the OneSight Foundation. You don't have to do anything differently. Just shop as usual, and your order will bring real help for someone who needs it.
Every donation brings us closer to a world where access to vision care is not determined by where a person is born, but is an opportunity available to everyone, everywhere.
Thank you for making that future possible.