Preventing Blindness, Saving Sight for Millions of People Around the World

For nearly 100 years, our members have worked on projects aimed at preventing blindness, restoring eyesight and improving eye care for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Lions volunteer to take part in sight projects that have:

• Provided nearly 8 million cataract surgeries.

• Saved the sight of more than 14 million children by providing eye screenings, glasses and other treatments through Sight for Kids.

• Prevented serious vision loss for more than 30 million people worldwide.

• Established or strengthened pediatric eye care centers that have helped more than 120 million children.

• Distributed more than 148 million treatments for river blindness.

• Vaccinated 41 million children in Africa against measles – a leading cause of childhood blindness.

• Improved eye care for 100 million people by training more than 650,000 eye care professionals and building 315 eye hospitals.

• Helped halt the spread of trachoma in Ethiopia by providing 10 million doses of the sight-saving drug azithromycin.

Since 1990, Lions have raised US$415 million to help provide vision for all.

Lions Work to Improve Sight

Through efforts such as these, Lions have gained worldwide recognition for our work to improve sight. Our members around the world are also actively involved in:

• Recycling eyeglasses at 17 centers worldwide.

• Supporting Lions Eye Banks that provide eye tissue for sight-saving surgeries.

• Screening the vision of hundreds of thousands of people every year.

• Providing treatment to those at risk of losing their vision.

In 1925, Helen Keller challenged Lions to become "knights of the blind in the crusade against darkness." And we accepted. Today, sight programs remain one of our defining causes.

Lions Clubs International is the world's largest service club organization with more than 1.4 million members in approximately 46,000 clubs in more than 200 countries and geographical areas around the world.