Eye Health Hero: Grace Chew

Grace Chew has established herself as a promising leader in providing vision care to the underserved population and rural communities and on behalf of all the lives she has impacted and served, we are proud to nominate her as a 2020 Eye Health Hero.

“I love my role because for the first time ever I’ve found what I love to do and it makes a difference! From working with likeminded partners on strategic collaborations to helping the underserved population, I can contribute to my best abilities as I get to see the huge and positive impact being made in the community. Eradicating poor vision in one generation is an incredible goal that the Essilor Group Mission Team have set for ourselves and I’m honored to be part of the team. I truly believe that we can meet this milestone as long as we continue to use our voices and actions to seek collaborations in order to prioritize the best resources to aid us in this journey.”

-Grace Chew

Working for Essilor Vision Foundation, her role and responsibilities includes Philanthropy Projects across the ASEAN region, Grace has pioneered the Foundation’s Village Screening Programme in Indonesia and has built a sustainable program to bring vision care access to those communities within East Java. Working hand in hand with John Fawcett Foundation, the team was able to conduct successful screenings for 24 villages in 6 months for more than 12,000 beneficiaries, with plans to provide additional vision care access to another 55,000 villagers in 2020-2021.

Grace has proven to be an incredible individual that is able to bring together likeminded organisations in the region, as she also worked with Rotary Club of Makati Dasmarinas, along with the Essilor Philippines team to rollout a plan of reaching out to more than 53,000 underprivileged children and providing them with vision care access and education in their school screening program.

In addition, due to the current pandemic situation where the physical vision screenings have become impossible to arrange due to lockdowns and social distancing, Grace has also expanded scale, reach and impact with digital engagement. This new campaign focuses on vision care awareness and advocacy. A series of philanthropy driven webinar series that inspires to build a culture of giving amongst the community is borne out of necessity. What started as a small initiative in Essilor turned out into such a popular initiative even amongst partners and other corporates. In the most recent webinar, Grace was involved in getting Special Olympics Asia Pacific on board as one of our panelists to talk about improving vision care access amongst the intellectually disabled. All this would not have been possible if not for Grace’s passion and drive to raise awareness on the vision care needs for the underserved population in ASEAN.

Through her ongoing efforts to provide relief during this period, she also approached our headquarters in France (Essilor Social Impact) to donate more than 7,000 safety eyewear to frontliners across different ASEAN countries.

Grace is definitely impacting and inspiring the vision care community in her pursuit of providing good vision care to all communities and we are proud to have her at the forefront of the Essilor Vision Foundation (ASEAN) team. Everything she does, takes into account the people she can serve, the people she will serve alongside and how she can get more people to serve. Her motto “Serving Others is the Best Service to Yourself” helps inspire those around her to think beyond themselves especially during these unprecedented times. For that we would like to name her a 2020 IAPB Eye Health Hero.