Save Your Vision Month and more

As you all know, March is Save Your Vision Month. This is a great opportunity for all of us to reach out to our communities and bring awareness to vision, eye health, eye safety, and more. The optometric profession comes in many different forms. Some of us work in patient care, others are educators or working in the industry. No matter where our optometric careers have taken us, the one thing we all have in common is that we are out in our communities helping people. We help people see better, we help people figure out what is wrong and how to best handle the situation, we help people learn and understand, and we help people heal. Today, I write asking you to help one more cause: our profession.

Our profession needs your help. We need your help legislatively, financially, and, most importantly, we need your time. We are currently working on several legislative initiatives including scope modification and children’s vision legislation. The help we are asking for can come in many different formats. First, we need doctors and students at Lobby Day. This is our opportunity to make a statement to our legislators. It is our biggest opportunity to educate them on our remarkable profession and the value we bring to our patients and our communities. For many of us, time is our most valuable asset. I am hoping you can give some time to our profession on March 25th at Lobby Day in Harrisburg. You can sign-up to attend here: https://pennsylvania.aoa.org/education-and-events/march-2019-x26597.

As we work towards our legislative goals, we also need your help financially. POPAC donations make a difference and every little bit helps. Because of your contributions, during 2018, we were able to attend 185 legislative breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and events. POPAC giving allowed us to support 76 Representatives, 38 Senators, six candidates, and six political action committees of the House and Senate. Each of these contacts was another opportunity to tell Optometry’s story. Many of our members give monthly donations on their credit card and this is extremely helpful. It allows us to anticipate our POPAC budget and plan for the most effective ways to use these funds. I ask each of you to please consider monthly contributions to POPAC. It really is simple; all you have to do is fill out this form: https://pennsylvania.aoa.org/documents/PA/POA-POPAC-pledge-form.pdf. For those of you who are already donating monthly, thank you!

My final ask of you today is for your help promoting optometry in your community. For example, one of our local societies has held a community awareness program every year from 1979 to 2017. Each year, the Anthracite Optometric Society arranged a massive 16-school, 2000-child program, the Save Your Vision Project. The second-grade students from each of these schools would participate in a coloring contest and winners were chosen from each individual classroom with an overall winner being selected from each school. The winners from each school would then gather at an awards ceremony to celebrate their accomplishments and receive their awards over lunch with the Project’s mascot, Seymour Safely. The children loved this special event and it brought great awareness to vision and eye safety. The local newspapers would cover the event, further promoting its importance. I would like to take a moment here to thank the tremendous efforts of the Anthracite Optometric Society, Dr. Gary Scheib, Dr. Shannon Scheuren, and everyone who made this event possible. Unfortunately, due to time and budgetary constraints within the local society, this program was not able to be held the last two years. I wanted to write about this fantastic project today to point out what a difference even one small group can make. I would like to see us all work together on projects that promote our goals, bring awareness to our communities, and have some fun in the process.

Many of our other local societies participate in important community events, also. My goal today is not to promote a specific event or project, but ask you simply to participate. These projects may be major events like Anthracite’s Save Your Vision Project or they may be smaller events like speaking to local groups or writing a public education article for your local newspaper. The POA would like to assist you with this endeavor. Our Clinical Care Committee is currently working on writing white papers to bring awareness to important vision and eye health concerns. In past years, member advocates for children’s vision created a presentation that is available for our doctors to present to school nurses around the commonwealth. These are just a few examples. If you have other ideas, I would love to hear them. Please consider donating your time to help our profession and our communities!

Thank you!

Lori Gray, O.D.
POA President