What to do with your second hand spectacles once they aren’t strong enough anymore?
Specsavers Katoomba co-owner Gayna Hancock-Marvin has joined with Lions Recycle for Sight, Ken Leonard, OAM, to ensure that refurbished quality spectacles can find a new home for people in need in impoverished communities around the world.
Over the 26 years that the Australian program has operated, Lions has delivered more than seven million pair of glasses to those in need in Africa, Europe, Middle East, Indian Sub- continent, East Asia, and the Far East, China, the countries of the Pacific Rim and Southern Asia and Oceania.
Australia-wide Specsavers has recently taken up collecting the glasses and sunglasses.
Recent global studies have found there are 101.2 million people visually impaired as a result of not having access to glasses. Over time as vision deteriorates, this has led to 6.8 million people living with blindness.
“When I found out just how many people are going blind in impoverished communities around the world simply because they don’t have access to glasses, I was shocked and we had to do something about it,” Ms Hancock-Marvin said.
“Blindness and vision impairments are so much worse in third world countries because they can mean the difference between people being able to have a job and feed their family, or not.”
The Katoomba store started collecting glasses last month and hope to collect 100 pairs a month. They had previously donated glasses on an ad hoc basis, but this is the first time the program has been taken up officially in the store.
Chairman of Lions Recycle for Sight, Ken Leonard said working with Specsavers will ensure “we can process more glasses than ever before and save the sight of so many more people”.
Mr Leonard said Lions had gone to extraordinary measures to date to deliver glasses. In the past decade several members of their marine branch had “used their oceangoing yachts to reach and test villagers, in the remotest areas for eyesight and deliver spectacles to them”.
