Vermont Business Magazine The Himalayan Cataract Project (HCP) has been selected as a winner of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s 2020 Holiday Impact Prize, supported by Focusing Philanthropy.
For decades, the Himalayan Cataract Project has pioneered the delivery of high quality eye care in underserved areas of the world while concurrently training local personnel. HCP brings the joy of sight-restoration to those who need it most. Over the last 25 years, together with its partners, HCP has performed over 1 million sight-restoring surgeries and screened and provided treatment for over 12.5 million people.
Himalayan Cataract Project is honored to be one of the two runners-up, along with OneGoal, which have each been awarded $25,000. The grand prize of $100,000 was awarded to CAMFED, the Campaign for Female Education, a pan-African movement that catalyzes the power of the most vulnerable girls and young women to create the future they imagine — for themselves, for their communities, and for Africa.
The Holiday Impact Prize will help Himalayan Cataract Project in its work to serve more than 1.6 million people annually through examinations and basic treatments including over 123,000 sight-restoring surgeries and hundreds of training opportunities for eye care personnel.
“When someone is cured of cataracts, they are no longer a statistic. They are able to get their life back, HCP Co-founder Geoff Tabin said. “People go from being completely blind to the day after surgery being able to see again, often with 20/20 vision. There is really no other intervention in medicine that provides this kind of miracle.”
Since 2009, Kristof has written an annual “holiday gift guide” New York Times column to highlight little-known organizations working to make the world a better place. He began writing the gift guide to bridge a philanthropic gap: readers who wanted to help but didn’t know how, and heroic individuals and organizations who desperately needed resources but were off donors’ radar.
The column has helped raise the profiles of organizations that work on the very issues he covers in his journalism—health, education, human rights and women’s rights, both domestically and abroad. Last year’s grand prize was awarded to Edna Adan University Hospital, a teaching hospital in Somaliland that is saving women’s lives in a country with one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world.
In the past 25 years, HCP has worked closely with partners in Nepal, dramatically improving eye care by creating a proven delivery model worthy of worldwide replication, resulting in a 59% decline in the prevalence of blindness in the country. Those methods continue to spread through Asia and Africa.
More information about Nicholas Kristof’s Holiday Impact Prize, this year’s winners, and Focusing Philanthropy can be found at KristofImpact.org.
Source: WATERBURY, Vt. —The Himalayan Cataract Project 11.24.2020