Riding a bus, holding down a job, shopping, interacting with other people—every aspect of life becomes more complicated when people have difficulty seeing. In a country where health insurance and primary care are out of reach for many people, vision care can be even harder to come by. Our funding enables the Illinois Eye Institute to treat eye problems of low-income Chicagoans and help them address the underlying causes.

The Illinois Eye Institute on Chicago's South Side has ninety thousand visits each year from people, mostly low-income, who are seeking help with eye problems. For every one who comes, there are many others who make do with limited vision and don't seek help until a crisis lands them in the emergency room or they lose their vision altogether.

Poverty, lack of health insurance, lack of primary care, lack of information, language barriers—all these prevent people from getting medical care generally, including adequate vision care. The results of lacking even routine care can be devastating. Without eyeglasses some people can't drive a car or read instructions on a medicine bottle. Sometimes symptoms like blurry vision will prompt people to seek help, but many times there are no symptoms until the condition is advanced; readily treatable problems like glaucoma are neglected until it's too late. And lack of vision care feeds into a much bigger problem, because eye problems can result from diseases such as diabetes or hypertension that, if left untreated, can become life-threatening.

Because of the need for eye care and medical care generally among low-income and uninsured people, the Illinois Eye Institute, with its parent institution, the Illinois College of Optometry, is taking a comprehensive approach to addressing this challenge. Its Vision of Hope Health Alliance was created with funding from the Fry Foundation and other foundations, including a major grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Through the Alliance, twenty-one community-based organizations and five community health centers join together to refer people to the Institute for eye care.

When patients come to the clinic, a case manager talks to them first about common eye problems and other general medical conditions. They get examinations and treatment for eye diseases, and nearly 90 percent receive eyeglasses. If patients don't have a primary care physician, the case manager makes appointments for them at the partnering community health agencies and follows up to make sure they get the care they need. For those who don't speak English, the program provides translators in several languages, including Spanish, Polish, French, Vietnamese, Korean, and Urdu. The Institute sees over 1,000 patients a year through Vision of Hope. Some are homeless or just out of prison; mostly they are working poor.

The Institute is tracking how often appointments are kept as well as incidents of eye disease, vision limitations, general medical diseases, and other markers. The results should both suggest how to improve its programs and make the case for improving vision and other medical services for low-income and uninsured people. The Institute also continues to spread the word to other community agencies both inside and outside its network.

"There is no reason to sit and suffer for a whole year without seeing," said one patient, who praised the clinic for helping her despite her inability to pay. "They helped me to understand what could happen with my eyes, that when changes occur I need to follow up and have my eyes checked, so that I will always have my vision," said another. "And they gave me new glasses, and that enabled me to read again after six years."

For another patient, the change was even more dramatic. "They gave me a prosthetic eye, they gave me glasses, they gave me my life back," she said. "My self-esteem is back, my confidence— I can look people in the eye again."