Unite For Sight's Innovative Model of Volunteering Abroad
Recruiting and Training New Leaders in Global Health
We engage, inspire, and train volunteers to support and assist eye clinics globally. Our volunteers receive hands-on training in international community-based eye care, public health, and international development, and while immersed in effective Unite For Sight programs, they gain skills to become new leaders in global health dedicated to creating lasting solutions for change.
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Unite For Sight supports eye clinics by investing human and financial resources in their social ventures to eliminate patient barriers to eye care. With the assistance of volunteers like you, Unite For Sight has restored sight to 18,471 patients and provided eye care to 600,000. Unite For Sight's programs demonstrate the highest standards in social entrepreneurship, and are sustainable, apply best practice principles in global health and development, and achieve effective change.
- Experience the thrill of contributing to change on the highest level
- Be part of global problem solving
- Receive training in effective community-based program delivery
- Be immersed in effective global health and eye care programs
- Be inspired to become a leader in global health
- Join a movement of social innovators committed to global health and sustainable development
- Be engaged in ethical, high quality and high impact volunteerism
"Through this organization[Unite For Sight]...I see that it's possible for medical practitioners, public health workers, and students, to come together and to achieve what seems impossible. That working selflessly with sensitivity to cultural difference and to human dignity, right thinking individuals can together change the way that the whole world works...And to provide a model for all those idealistic young people...who want to do their part to make this world a better place."--Jane Edwards, Associate Dean for International Affairs, Yale University, at the 2008 Unite For Sight Conference
Anyone Can Volunteer, From Any Country
Unite for Sight's programs are locally led and managed by our partner eye clinics that provide year-round high quality eye care and continuity of care for all patients. Unite For Sight volunteers work with local ophthalmic nurses, optometrists, and ophthalmologists to support and assist the clinic in outreach programs that reduce all of the barriers to health care, including financial, transportation, and education barriers. The programs in which volunteers participate are sustainable, apply best practice principles in global health and development, and achieve effective change.
What Is Unite For Sight's Socially Innovative Volunteer Model?
While creating a committed vanguard of thousands of volunteers worldwide, Unite For Sight challenges students, professionals, educators, and eye doctors, to rethink what it means to eliminate preventable blindness through local capacity building.
Unite For Sight's innovative and entrepreneurial model:
- Harnesses idealism with practicality and infrastructure
- Partners with local eye clinics to provide eye care in communities without previous access
- Engages thousands of non-eye care professionals in direct eye care services that are eliminating blindness worldwide
- Mobilizes eye care professionals in countries throughout the world to "Unite For Sight", work collaboratively, and exchange skills and best practices across continents
- Empowers patients and communities to be engaged in preventing and eliminating blindness
- Connects organizations, eye clinics, universities, the public, and communities, to develop sustainable programs that create permanent change
- Cultivates leadership, talent, and ideas among its eye clinic partners and among its volunteers
- Motivates and encourages volunteers to be proactive and entrepreneurial
What Do Volunteers Do?
- Participate in hands-on clinical service while assisting eye doctors in rural villages, refugee camps, and slums
- Local eye doctors and Unite For Sight volunteers work together to provide community-based screening programs to patients living in extreme poverty
- Volunteers are immersed in and receive training in effective, sustainable international health and development programs
- Volunteers immediately see the joy on patients' faces when their sight is restored after years of blindness.
While helping the community, volunteers are in a position to witness and draw their own conclusions about the failures and inequities of global health systems. It broadens their view of what works, and what role they can have to insure a health system that works for everyone and that leaves no person blind in the future.
Volunteers Create Real, Lasting Change
Ophthalmologist Dr. Rose Speaks About The Importance of Volunteering With Unite For Sight
Volunteer Chiwing "Jessica" Qu Discusses Volunteering With Unite For Sight
