The Moraga High School Junior Who Turned His Community's Old Eyeglasses Into a Global Mission

I grew up watching my grandfather go blind.

He has glaucoma , a disease that if caught early and treated consistently, is manageable. But access to that kind of consistent care wasn't something he had. So I watched, year after year, as his vision slowly narrowed. I watched a man who had seen so much of the world lose the ability to see the faces of the people sitting across from him.

What stayed with me wasn't just the grief of it. It was an injustice. My grandfather wasn't going blind because of bad luck. He was going blind because of a gap — a gap in access, in resources, in the basic infrastructure of eye care that so many of us in Lamorinda take completely for granted. And the more I learned, the more I understood that his story wasn't rare. It was the norm. Hundreds of millions of people around the world are living with vision impairment that is entirely preventable , not because the solutions don't exist, but because they simply can't reach them.

I was a rising freshman at Campolindo High School when I decided I wasn't going to just sit with that. I didn't know if one teenager in Moraga could actually make a dent in a problem that large. But I knew I had to at least try to take a chance at fixing it —even if just for one person — the way someone could have been that change for my grandfather.

That decision turned into an international organization I started called I Spy A Good Pair Of Eyes, a Lamorinda based non-profit collecting eyeglasses from the community and redistributing to people around the world without access to eyecare, while providing eye-testing and preventative care. And what happened next surprised even me.

Getting donated glasses to the people who need them isn't as simple as putting them in a box and mailing them. Prescription eyewear has to be matched carefully, and the wrong pair can do more harm than good. Distribution has to be supervised by trained optometrists and reaching remote communities abroad requires trusted partners on the ground.

So I started building those pieces, one at a time, right here in Moraga.

Since 2022, neighbors across Lamorinda have been dropping off their old eyeglasses at local libraries and community centers. Local businesses — including Tangelos Froyo and Loard's Ice Cream right here in the area — have hosted fundraisers. Friends and families have spread the word. Every pair that comes in gets sorted, graded by prescription, and held until it can be matched to someone who genuinely needs it. This isn't a loose collection drive — it's a supply chain, run by a high schooler with a lot of community behind him.

And that community has quietly been changing lives.

In July 2022, our team traveled to Tiruchengode, India for our first distribution event, partnering with the local Rotary Club there to run a hospital-based distribution with volunteer optometrists. It went well enough that we never stopped. Every year since, we've continued sending glasses back to that same community through our ongoing Rotary ties — because impact isn't a one-time trip. It's a relationship.

In July 2025, we expanded to Merida, Mexico, running a community screening event in partnership with the Merida Foundation. Dozens of residents who had been living with blurry vision for years, some for decades, were fitted with corrective eyewear.

Each mission has made the next one bigger. And now we're taking the biggest step yet.

This July, I'm bringing a team to a new community in dire need of these vision resources: the Chiredzi region of rural Zimbabwe. Over three days, we'll conduct free vision screenings and distribute prescription eyeglasses to an estimated 400 to 450 students, parents, teachers, and community elders across multiple sites.

We're doing this through a three-way partnership: we’re working with the Fambisa Isizwe Foundation, which has deep roots in these communities and sponsors students at two rural schools there, and the Council for the Blind Zimbabwe, which will provide licensed optometrists, opticians, and all clinical screening equipment. Our job is to show up with the eyewear and community coordination.

The glasses themselves come primarily from local suppliers within Zimbabwe — 400 brand-new pairs at $2.20 each. That number stops people when they hear it. Two dollars and twenty cents for a pair of prescription glasses that lets a child read the board at school. That lets a farmer work without squinting. That lets an elder recognize the face of a grandchild. We'll also bring approximately 75 carefully vetted frames from our California collection — individually inspected and matched to prescriptions on-site.

But here's what makes this trip different from a typical mission: we're not just showing up and leaving.

Before we go home, we'll be training local teachers to identify students with vision problems — the signs to look for, the referral process to follow, the resources to use. We're leaving behind kits so that the work continues in those schools long after July 17th. The goal is a model that lives in the community, not one that depends on us coming back.

It's the same philosophy that drives everything we do: don't just give someone a fish. Build something that lasts.

But none of this happens without Lamorinda.

The glasses in our inventory come from our community. The fundraiser dollars that keep us operating come from our community. The support — from neighbors who drop off a pair they haven't worn in ten years, from local businesses who open their doors for a fundraiser night, from families who share their posts and tell their friends — all of it comes from here.

That's why I am asking for your help. Every pair of glasses sitting unused in a Moraga or Lafayette or Orinda home is a potential gift of sight for someone in Zimbabwe this July.

I Spy A Good Pair Of Eyes is a registered California nonprofit with federal 501(c)(3) status pending. If you'd like to donate, get involved, request a glasses porch pick-up, please reach out at ispyagoodpairofeyes@gmail.com or visit www.ispyagoodpairofeyes.org.

At $2.20 a pair, even a small contribution goes a long way. A $22 donation puts glasses on ten people. A $50 donation covers more than twenty. Please donate by visiting the link at www.ispyagoodpairofeyes.org.

Lamorinda is a community that cares. I've seen that my whole life, in every pair of glasses left at a drop box, in every business that opened its doors for us. This July, that care travels to Zimbabwe — one pair at a time.

Nitin Ravikumar is a rising senior at Campolindo High School and the founder of I Spy A Good Pair Of Eyes. He can be reached at ispyagoodpairofeyes@gmail.com or at www.ispyagoodpairofeyes.org.