It’s a recurring post on nextdoor.com: people asking what to do with their old eyeglasses when they get a new pair. The Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti Lions Clubs have the answer: They maintain collection boxes at a host of local sites, including optometrists, pharmacies, and senior centers (there’s a full list online at bit.ly/eyeglassdonations). In February, Ann Arbor club secretary Carol Downton had fifteen Banker Boxes, each with 300 glasses, ready to go for further cleaning and sorting at the Lions’ Grand Rapids recycling center.
According to the World Health Organization, 1 billion people have vision impairments that could have been prevented or could be corrected. In 1925, Helen Keller challenged the Lions to become “knights of the blind in a crusade against darkness,” and their 48,000 clubs around the world have made it their mission ever since.
Chad McCann, executive director of the Lions of Michigan Foundation, emails that donated glasses “go to either our Lions Eyeglass Recycling Center (LERC) in Grand Rapids or to the Michigan College of Optometry at Ferris State University,” where volunteers “clean, repackage, and catalog the glasses by prescription for redistribution.” They’re not allowed to redistribute them in the United States, so they’re delivered on Lions mission trips to countries where most people can’t afford new glasses—the cost can equal a month’s salary.
McCann says the clubs also recycle and redistribute hearing aids and new hearing-aid batteries. Hearing aids, without cases, can be dropped in the same collection boxes.
Donna Wicker, an optometrist at Kellogg Eye Center, recently returned from her fourth trip. In her eight years as a Lion, she’s been to Mexico twice and once to Jamaica. This time, she traveled with twelve other Ann Arbor Lions to Suriname, the smallest country in South America. Working with the local Lions Club members, they saw roughly 600 people a day.
Wicker says that even a pair of reading glasses makes all the difference to people whose livelihood is making jewelry, doing beadwork, or other eye-centric work. “It’s one of the things we do that takes a ten-minute visit and changes a life.”
