Unite For Sight's Innovative Model of Volunteering Abroad

Recruiting and Training New Leaders in Global Health

We engage, inspire, and train volunteers to support and assist eye clinics globally. Our volunteers receive training in international community-based eye care, public health, and international development, and while immersed in effective Unite For Sight programs, they gain skills to become new leaders in global health.

As Featured Weekly On

With the assistance of volunteers like you, Unite For Sight has restored sight to 17,000 patients and provided eye care to 600,000.

  • Experience the thrill of contributing to change on the highest level
  • Be part of global problem solving
  • Receive training in community-based program delivery
  • Be immersed in effective global health and eye care programs
  • Be inspired to become a leader in global health

Anyone Can Volunteer, From Any Country

What Is Unite For Sight's Socially Innovative Volunteer Model?

While creating a committed vanguard of thousands of volunteers worldwide, Unite For Sight challenges students, professionals, educators, and eye doctors, to rethink what it means to eliminate preventable blindness through local capacity building.

Unite For Sight's innovative and entrepreneurial model:

  • Harnesses idealism with practicality and infrastructure
  • Partners with local eye clinics to provide eye care in communities without previous access
  • Engages thousands of non-eye care professionals in direct eye care services that are eliminating blindness worldwide
  • Mobilizes eye care professionals in countries throughout the world to "Unite For Sight", work collaboratively, and exchange skills and best practices across continents
  • Empowers patients and communities to be engaged in preventing and eliminating blindness
  • Connects organizations, eye clinics, universities, the public, and communities, to develop sustainable programs that create permanent change
  • Cultivates leadership, talent, and ideas among its eye clinic partners and among its volunteers
  • Motivates and encourages volunteers to be proactive and entrepreneurial

What Do Volunteers Do?

  • Participate in hands-on clinical service while assisting eye doctors in rural villages, refugee camps, and slums
  • Local eye doctors and Unite For Sight volunteers work together to provide community-based screening programs to patients living in extreme poverty
  • Volunteers are immersed in and receive training in effective, sustainable international health and development programs
  • Volunteers immediately see the joy on patients' faces when their sight is restored after years of blindness.

While helping the community, volunteers are in a position to witness and draw their own conclusions about the failures and inequities of global health systems. It broadens their view of what works, and what role they can have to insure a health system that works for everyone and that leaves no person blind in the future.

Volunteers Create Real, Lasting Change

Ophthalmologist Dr. Rose Speaks About The Importance of Volunteering With Unite For Sight

Volunteer Chiwing "Jessica" Qu Discusses Volunteering With Unite For Sight

Volunteer Abroad

As featured weekly on
“
Because of the context in which I encountered the profound need, I did not come away with a sense of hopelessness or fatalism. Rather, I came away with the strong sense that it was necessary for me, like the Sinha family of ophthalmologists, to take active part in fixing the problems that I had seen. Indeed, it is impossible to spend two weeks with the Sinha family without coming to understand that a single, motivated person is absolutely capable of changing the world.
”
—Emily Abrash, Unite For Sight Volunteer in India