The soaking heat. The blaring school loudspeaker. The lush green backdrop. The hours spent tracking autorefractor readings. The camaraderie of colleagues with a serving mantra. The smiles of a thousand children.
A world awash in a colorful palette, Thailand is now a memory but the Essilor #DifferenceMakers mission trip is one that I will never forget. Some of you may have joined on a mission/service trip during your career, and you know how powerful the experience can be. Helping others who have limited access to vision care is a purely humbling endeavor.
“When you have the ability to help someone, the knowledge that will heal someone, how can you withhold it based upon their ability to pay?”
—SERGUL ERZURUM, M.D.,
OPHTHALMOLOGIST + #DIFFERENCEMAKER
For the experience, I am eternally grateful. For the future, I am incredibly inspired.
Starting on page 45, we take a visual tour of the #DifferenceMakers trip, the capstone of an Essilor campaign celebrating incredible eyecare professionals who are passionate about helping others in need by providing vision care. We also learn about and check in with each of the ECP #DifferenceMakers who were nominated to attend the mission trip to Southeast Asia, which took us from the Essilor Vision Foundation offices in Singapore to two schools outside Bangkok to provide vision screenings for nearly 2,000 children over two days (and eyewear for the many who needed it).
For those of you who leave these pages inspired, we share info on Essilor’s Changing Life through Lenses program, which makes it simple for ECPs to provide no-cost eyewear to those in need within their own community. What the Essilor Vision Foundation is doing around the world and here at home to eradicate poor vision is truly amazing. In January 2019 alone, over 11,000 children’s vision screenings were provided in Asia.
90%
of the world’s vision-impaired live in low-income settings.
We so hope that you enjoy this special issue—we also collab with two highly inspiring edCFDA eyewear designers for a wildly cool high-end specs edit (see it starting on page 34) not to be missed.
In this uniquely special issue, we also collab with edCFDA designers Gai Gherardi + Blake Kuwahara for our luxe specs edit.
ON OUR COVER
Model: Milan Dixon/ Photogenics
Photography: Jurgen Reisch
Hair + Makeup: James McMahon/Cloutier Remix
Fitting Optician: Julia Gogosha of Gogosha Optique
Frame: Oxbow by 1.a.Eyeworks
Erinn Morgan
Editor-in-Chief + Editorial Director
Eyecare Business
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