Since 2004, AmeriCorps Members have served with Impact Alabama’s FocusFirst Initiative, a nationally unique vision care program which partners with college students to provide vision screenings to more than 30,000 low-income preschool-age children at over 1,000 daycare sites in Alabama each year. Thanks to the support of AmeriCorps, FocusFirst can now provide Alabama children with high quality vision care services unmatched by any other state.

FocusFirst: An Alabama Student Vision Initiative provides a cost-effective direct response to the vision problems of children who live in urban and rural communities across Alabama. Under the supervision of Impact Alabama AmeriCorps Members, undergraduate and graduate students provide free vision screenings to children, ages six months to five years, in Head Starts and lower-income daycares using high-tech photo optic scan cameras. All children failing the screenings receive free follow-up care through Sight Savers America, another AmeriCorps program. Over 2,100 college students at more than twenty colleges and universities throughout Alabama have participated with FocusFirst. Over the last eight years, FocusFirst has screened more than 140,000 children in all 67 Alabama counties, with approximately 11% of the children failing the screenings and receiving free follow-up care as necessary.

Poor vision adversely affects tens of thousands of children each year, leading to a substandard education, behavioral problems, and low self esteem. This is largely the result of poor public awareness about the importance of eye care in young children and the inability of children to recognize their own vision problems. These problems are heightened in families from economically disadvantaged backgrounds by financial hardship and lack of access to appropriate medical care. Furthermore, it is well recognized that vision screenings are most effective during the preschool years when early identification and treatment of many conditions can prevent irreversible vision damage or loss. Despite the importance of early screening and detection, it is estimated that only 21% of preschool children receive comprehensive vision screenings.

Although the solution to many societal problems can be governmental, screening preschool-aged children for vision problems before they reach public schools is cost-prohibitive for most states. FocusFirst demonstrates, however, that a long-term, systematic solution can be implemented through permanent curricular commitments by a network of universities to meet specific needs of communities throughout a state. FocusFirst coupled the recognition that vision screenings are most effective during the preschool years when early identification and treatment can be most beneficial with the belief in the moral obligation of providing basic health care to children as a hallmark of socially responsible citizenship. The result is a program that successfully delivers technologically advanced vision care to low-income children in Alabama through a rare collaboration with colleges across the state.

AmeriCorps Members coordinate every aspect of the FocusFirst program, including recruiting and training college students to perform screenings, developing relationships with college professors to ensure student participation, contacting day cares to schedule screenings, and conducting screenings and overseeing volunteers at Head Start and daycare centers.