Eye Health Care Charity of the Month

We begin our new series – focusing on a different eye health care charity each month – by hearing from Dr David Parkins about the aims and work of the Spectacle Makers’ Charity.

Katherine Jerome, 2021/22 bursary award winner, is a former music teacher retraining to be a dispensing optician

The Spectacle Makers’ Charity (SMC) is the grant-giving arm of the Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers (WCSM). Funded by past and present members of the Company, it is managed by an independent board of trustees. Together, they cover a range of eye health disciplines as well as bringing practical, financial and charity experience from their day jobs.

Our charitable aim is to improve the lives of people with vision impairment and support those who treat eye health, in line with the WCSM’s mission to support better vision for all. Since 2020, the SMC has awarded grants totalling more than £266,000 to many worthy causes. Our giving covers a wide range of charities and purposes and, subject to sufficient income, the trustees have agreed to continue with this diversified approach.

Bursary awards

The SMC supports people just starting out on a career in eye health. Since the launch of its bursary scheme, it has given more than £120,000 in awards for students in dispensing optics, optometry and orthoptics – as well as awards for professional development opportunities for trainee ophthalmologists. The awards run to a fixed programme starting in late autumn, and each award is worth up to £1,000. Each student has to explain in their own words why their training is so important to them, how much money they need, and how they would spend it.

Bursary winners in the past have used the funds to help with tuition and membership fees, placement costs, equipment, driving lessons, childcare costs, travel – even specialist contact lenses – things that really made a difference to their own studies. The process is competitive, and each bursary award winner has to provide a written report on their progress. The trustees then invite one person, whose report best shows the impact the bursary has had on them, to the annual presentation ceremony in the City of London. Student dispensing optician, Katherine Jerome, now in her final year at ABDO College, was the recipient of the best report award in 2021/22.

Supporting eye healthcare in sub-Saharan Africa

Grants to organisations

Here are just a few of our recent grants to organisations:

Glaucoma-NET by the VISION 2020 Links programme

A grant over three years has enabled a dedicated website to be established through which glaucoma practitioners from low-income countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, can discuss cases and share learning in all aspects of glaucoma care and management. The website is available to everyone involved in eye health care – ophthalmologists, assistants, nurses, optometrists, counsellors and many others who are part of teams working at community, primary, secondary and tertiary levels.

It will also kick-start use of a new toolkit for the management of glaucoma across Nigeria. The toolkit provides a framework and a ‘how to’ guide for glaucoma teams in low-income countries to improve their services and offer ‘best practice’ to their patients. The funding will enable cascade training of glaucoma specialists to implement the toolkit in their own hospitals across Nigeria over the next three years.

Goalball UK

Goalball is a fast and furious paralympic sport and will feature in the 2024 games in Paris. It was developed after the Second World War as a highly competitive sport in which the players’ level of vision, or loss of vision, does not matter so everyone has an equal ability to participate. All players wear eyeshades so that they are totally blind-folded, and the ball contains internal bells, which help players locate it during play.

Several SMC grants have supported Goalball UK

Each team has three people. The objective is to score goals by bowling or throwing the ball along the floor so that it crosses the goal line of the opposing team. In a similar way to tennis, the ball first has to land within set ‘tramlines’ marked out in tape on the floor. The defending team has to prevent the ball going into their goal by stopping it while remaining in their team area. They must then try to control the ball and attack by throwing or rolling the ball back again quickly to try and score in the other goal.

Several SMC grants have supported the national governing body, Goalball UK, to generate significant nationwide interest in the sport as a result of various events and advocacy efforts, and to increase the number of clubs operating in London and around the country.

Extant and other arts and culture

Extant is the UK’s leading professional performing arts company for visually impaired artists and theatre practitioners, producing touring productions and delivering training regionally and internationally. The SMC has helped to fund a series of crew and design workshops for visually impaired people, culminating in live performances.

The charity has also previously funded nationwide touch tours and audio-described performances by Northern Ballet and the Welsh National Opera. We also gave small recent grants to a local arts group in Croydon to increase facilities for people with low vision, and to an archaeology project for vision impaired people researching the Battle of Waterloo. Our support has helped vision impaired people to enjoy theatre as a cast member, backstage, or watching live and recorded performances.

Research: JDRF

Because our resources are very limited, we can only help by making smaller grants for pilot research projects and in support of other organisations and academic institutions. An example is a grant of £10,000 made last year to JDRF for a research project harnessing advances in artificial intelligence to predict, and potentially prevent, future retinopathy and other complications related to Type 1 diabetes.

The research team at JDRF led by Dr Helen Colhoun

The Spectacle Makers’ Charity is registered Charity no. 1186122 in England and Wales. Its 2023 Impact report can be found here.

For anyone wishing to support the Charity, there is a wide range of options including a facility on the website for online one-off or regular donations with Gift Aid – here.