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Seva is transforming people's lives with your gifts
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Thank you! We immediately put your gifts to work helping people around the world gain better health and new opportunities.
Take a look below at some of the highlights of Seva’s recent work and you’ll get a better idea of how your support is helping to transform people’s lives.
Sight Program
Seva makes the most of every donation by investing in projects that help communities develop their own high quality, affordable eye care services.
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Tibet For people in the mountains of Tibet, mobile eye camps are the only way to get the services they need. Seva supported ten eye camps in recent months, which means 4,800 people received exams and nearly 1,200 had sight-restoring cataract surgery. Our partner hospitals performed another 18,000 eye exams and 1,300 surgeries, half of them free of charge to low-income patients. We also supported trainings for 15 local Tibetan eye care personnel, including two pediatric ophthalmologists, one cataract surgeon, one nurse, and eleven rural health workers. |
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Nepal Seva’s partners in Nepal conducted six surgical eye camps, 71 screening camps, and 198 school screenings, serving a total of nearly 65,000 people. Additionally, the Seva-supported Primary Eye Care Centers and our two partner eye hospitals performed nearly 45,000 eye exams and about 2,000 sight-restoring surgeries.
Cambodia The program is growing by leaps and bounds! Seva’s Cambodian partners performed over 15,500 eye exams, a 153% increase over the same period last year. These exams resulted in over 2,600 sight-restoring surgeries — a 149% increase over the same six-month period last year, and 435% more than the same period two years ago.
Guatemala This is an exciting new collaboration between Seva’s Sight Program and our Community Self-Development Program (CSD). Working with our local partner, the Visualiza Eye Care System, along with some of our longtime CSD community group partners, we conducted eight community eye health screenings in the Peten region of Guatemala, an area with no other eye care providers. Nearly 900 people were examined and patients needing follow-up care were referred to Visualiza’s nearest clinic.
North India The new Bisanda Vision Center, located in the Banda District of Uttar Pradesh, India, opened in December. This is the fourth Seva-supported vision center established with Sadguru Netrak Chikitsalaya (SNC), our partner in North/Central India. Additionally, SNC conducted 214 outreach camps during this period, screening over 36,000 people for eye health, and performing more than 6,600 eye surgeries.
Native American Program
Diabetes Wellness Program Over the past few months, Diabetes Talking Circles facilitator trainings have been held in the Albuquerque, Navajo, Alaska and Portland Indian Health Services designated regions, reaching a total of 80 health care providers in 35 tribal sites. With these latest trainings, a major milestone has been reached. Lorelei DeCora, Seva’s Diabetes Project Director, reports that Diabetes Talking Circles trainings have now been held in all 12 Indian Health Services regions. Since the trainings started in 2002 in the Northern Plains, this culturally appropriate type 2 diabetes education model has truly spread nationwide!
Native American Grants Program Seva recently completed a 6-month review of our Native American work as part of a program development process. Just as we first approached the Black Hills Survival Gathering in 1980 to ask, “How can Seva be of service?” this Review was based on widespread community input, with more than 45 Native-led organizations consulted.
We listened carefully to how communities have changed over the years, and how Seva can best be a support. Here’s some of what we heard:
- Seva’s startup support sparks other funds “Seva’s grant opened up other funding and connections that we would not have pursued if we did not get that boost.”
- Our relationships build confidence “Receiving a grant from Seva validated our work. It instilled the idea that, ‘If Seva thinks it’s important, it must be!’”
- Our approach challenges the status quo “Most funding opportunities are more narrow and make the community try to write just what they want to hear. Seva has allowed us to write more about how it actually is.”
We look forward to adapting our program in response to the review findings, so Seva can continue its community-building work in even more meaningful, measureable ways in the years ahead.
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