Dear fellow Rotarians and friends,

ROI has now been restyled the Rotarians Ophthalmic Initiative to better reflect that it is about helping to make blindness history, and not just about shipping equipment, as some have perceived.

Could potential host Clubs/Districts please take on board, that following a recent experience, linked matching grant opportunities will only be brokered when the host Club and/or District is prepared to take action to encourage and make available the low cost, award winning, pen sized, Optyse, or equivalent product to mid level staff in remote locations.  The Optyse has been specifically invented to support screening by less qualified people in remote heartlands of developing countries, and not just hospitals in cities, town and townships.

We are delighted to say that in a short period of time since we announced the TRF dimension, ROI is being approached to help establish new TRF Matching Grant opportunities to support surgery & other eye-care treatments. We are working hard on that to publish completed profiles of need.

Whilst there are so many deserving causes, would potential applicants please note that ROI cannot support non-sight enabling projects.

We need also to advise that potential applicants should feel comfortable in meeting our one and only condition, reproduced here for convenience from the ROI website … Where an ROI supported TRF grant project is being put together, following a needs assessment, we expect that 10% to 20% of the project value will be applied to make the Optyse™, or equivalent, available to trained people, living or working in remote locations, to undertake preventative general health & eye-care screening programmes.

If you are comfortable with that, and wish to develop an ROI supported matching grant project, we would love to hear from you and help you achieve your goal.

With best wishes,

Stephen, Stevenage Grange RC, District 1260

www.roisight.org