Tackling Vision Care Disparities: How One Nonprofit Uses an NFL Team’s Celebrity to Improve Poor Children's Eyesight - and Life Chances
When NFL offensive lineman Jermane Mayberry was 16 years old, he was diagnosed with amblyopia, or “lazy eye,” and was pronounced legally blind in his left eye. “I thought everyone saw the way I did,” he recalls, noting that no one else in his rural Texas hometown had noticed his eye problem, either. “But when I got into high school, I was having trouble seeing out of my good eye, because the strain of overcompensating had finally caught up with me.” Mayberry later learned that, had his eyes been checked when he was a child, his amblyopia could have been easily corrected by wearing an eye patch.
Part of a collection of papers written for Stanford Social Innovation Review.
