SUNY Community Shines on World Sight Day

SUNY was a sea of World Sight Day Challenge T-shirts on Oct. 10.

SUNY was a sea of World Sight Day Challenge T-shirts on Oct. 10.

For the first time in its history, the State University of New York, State College of Optometry (SUNY) celebrated World Sight Day, setting a new fundraising record in the process. Student leaders sold 184 T-shirts, more than any other school or college of optometry, as part of Optometry Giving Sight’s “World Sight Day Challenge,” the annual global fundraising campaign designed to address avoidable blindness caused by uncorrected refractive error.

World Sight Day is sponsored by the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness and supports World Health Organization programs aimed at eradicating avoidable blindness. It has been held around the globe on the second Thursday of October since 2007.

Also: In recent months, the Optometric Center of New York, the philanthropic arm of SUNY, has received grants totaling more than $85,000 in support of the college’s partnership with the Bowery Mission in New York City, which provides high-quality vision care for a segment of the city’s underserved population. Funding has come from private donors as well as from the George Link Jr. Foundation, the Lydia Collins deForest Charitable Trust, the Chatlos Foundation, the Ethel Kennedy Foundation, the Hyde and Watson Foundation and the Tides Foundation.