SEEING IS MORE BEAUTIFUL NOW FOR THOUSANDS

It’s never good to lose your sight—whether you just need reading glasses or you are becoming permanently blind. Beyond the practical aspect of being able to see where you are going, what you are doing, and what is going on, vision is a powerful portal to beauty. Being able to see something beautiful—a work of art, a work of nature, an act of giving, friendship, love—transforms us. Why are eyes the windows to the soul? The soul is the part of us that receives and creates beauty.

VisionSpring and Bookwish, two visionary not-for-profit organizations, are helping to restore peoples’ lives by bringing glasses to millions of the world’s poorest and most at-risk people.

VisionSpring offers inexpensive drugstore-type reading glasses to thousands of trained health workers in developing countries so they can sell them at affordable rates to people in their communities. Bookwish has collected glasses, donated by major optical companies, and distributed them to Darfurian refugees so they could see a way out somehow.

A seamstress can once again thread a needle, a carpenter can once again see the nails he is hammering, a grandmother can read the label on medicine she gives to her grandchildren—because these glasses restored their sight. A child can now read and find a new way to move the world forward.

Now they too can see what’s BeautifulNow.