Janice Guzon
Founder/president of EYEsee
University of Chicago
Public policy and sociology double major
She has helped distribute your old eyeglasses to 35,000 people around the world who can’t afford new ones.
GLAMOUR: Your work is all about glasses and running a company that’s responsible for collecting and donating tens of thousands of pairs to people in need across the world. Why glasses?
Janice Guzon: Back in high school, I always knew I wanted to make a difference and had all these really grand ideas of how to do it. But as a student I ran into the common hurdle of not having the money and not knowing where to begin. That changed when my aunt from the Philippines sent my family a letter that my dad read aloud at the dinner table one night.
GLAMOUR: What’d it say?
JG: She went through some updates on her life, but the thing that stuck out most was that she was begging my dad for money to buy eyeglasses. I could understand her begging for money to buy food or clothes but … eyeglasses? I’d gotten a new pair every other year because of my insurance plan. So that she’d beg for glasses felt weird and piqued my curiosity.
GLAMOUR: And how have you managed to go from being a 15-year-old with big dreams to help the world to a 20-year-old who’s actually doing it?
JG: I left dinner that night and did some research as to what exactly vision has to do with productivity. I hypothesized that my aunt wasn’t being productive so she couldn’t work, so therefore she couldn’t get money and she couldn’t see. My research supported that. The statistic that really hit me is that for a family of four that makes about $4 per day, a pair of eyeglasses can cost a years salary.
GLAMOUR: Wow. And you have to think that for every family of four, at least one person might need glasses.
JG: Yeah. It turns out that, of the 153 million people in the world who have vision problems, about 90 percent live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Meanwhile, four million pairs of used eyeglasses get thrown out every year in the U.S., and I couldn’t believe that a family would have to choose between buying eyeglasses for the kids or buying eyeglasses for the mom or dad, who need to work. I wanted to fix the disparity.
GLAMOUR: Was that the formal kick-off of EYEsee?
JG: I started EYEsee the summer of 2008. A bunch of friends and I wrote letters to different churches, senior homes, elementary schools, and high schools. We sent formal letters to hundreds of places asking for glasses donations.
GLAMOUR: How responsive were people?
JG: My friends and I were incredibly persistent. We would call people constantly and drive out to various institutions and give them presentations about what we wanted to do with their old glasses. We collected about 5,000 pairs our first year and 7,000 the next. The following year was around 8,000 and then 9,000. People really caught on.
GLAMOUR: How do you decide where the donated glasses go?
JG: We divide them up to different locations based on our partner organizations and their particular needs and missions. We recently supported missions to Cambodia and Haiti and different regions of the Philippines. Our partners send us detailed mission reports, and as we expand, we get new partners. We also get donations from local businesses. We got 700 pairs of eyeglasses from one eyeglass store and sent them along to Cambodia.
GLAMOUR: So are the recipients essentially getting the donors’ particular prescription lenses?
JG: Yeah, the recipients of these eyeglasses actually try pairs on one by one to find the closest fit. That’s how badly they need glasses. There was a man from Uganda who came a day late to the distribution and was begging our partner organization for eyeglasses. They’d run out, and he got down to his knees explaining that he’d walked for miles and needed a pair. That’s really the extent of the need for custom lenses.
GLAMOUR: Have you become an expert on glasses? Can you fit people?
JG: EYEsee partnered with a local optometrist, and I asked him if he’d allow us to use his store and equipment to measure the donated prescription eyeglasses. That’s how we figure out what the prescriptions are. There are days when our volunteers are there for hours sorting and measuring frames. And sometimes trying on the crazy old lady and kid pairs we get.
GLAMOUR: What are your goals for EYEsee?
JG: Trying to actually take my volunteers on missions to the countries we donate to. We always hear stories about how moms get their glasses and start crying because it’s the first time in a long time that they’ve been able to see their kids’ faces clearly.
GLAMOUR: Are there any similarly satisfying moments in the local collections you host?
JG: Once we were collecting at a church and a man came up to our table and asked about what we were doing. When we told him, he took the glasses right off his face and put them in our donation box. Another woman once came up to me while I was doing a collection and just gave me a hug and started crying. She told me her husband had just passed away and that she was donating his eyeglasses. The idea is that by giving up your old glasses, you’re really helping somebody without making much of a sacrifice at all, and that’s amazing.
GLAMOUR: Definitely. So how can I donate the three old pairs of glasses I have buried at home in the back of a drawer?
JG: Go here!