VISTA provides access to vision care for at-risk youth

This fall, MN Internship Center‘s Minnesota Campus Compact College Health Corps VISTA, Rachel Zucker, successfully launched the Health Advocate program at three of MNIC’s four high school locations. MN Internship Center is a decentralized inner city charter high school which serves a student population facing many barriers to completing their high school education. All students are low income, one third are categorized as homeless and one third as parenting/pregnant.  The Health Advocate program places work study students from local colleges at the MNIC schools where Advocates connect students to health resources and run programs to improve student health literacy.

In the first month of programming, the Advocates provided a vision screening program to identify students who qualified for a free eyeglasses clinic called OneSight. Over one-fourth of the students screened had poor enough vision to qualify for the free eyeglasses. For almost all of the 14 MNIC students who attended the clinic, the free vision clinic was their first experience with professional eye exams. The exam results were startling – some students were so farsighted that reading was nearly impossible; others were legally blind in one eye. Students were excited to pick out their own designer eyeglass frames and show off their new glasses at school.

The OneSight clinic donation of close to $3,000 in eye exams and glasses was a vital opportunity for MNIC students. Without the VISTA’s efforts to coordinate MNIC’s participation in the clinic, and the Health Advocates’ work at implementing the vision screening, MNIC students would not have been able to access the vision screenings and eyeglasses that they sorely needed.