Nonprofit up for $100M grant

The Himalayan Cataract Project in Waterbury has its eyes on a $100 million prize.

The Waterbury nonprofit has been named one of eight humanitarian groups that could receive a $100 million grant in an international competition sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation.

The money would be used to further the organization’s mission of eliminating needless blindness.

“It is an honor to be selected as a semifinalist, and it is my hope that Vermont will share in the positive exposure,” said Job C. Heintz, executive director of the Himalayan Cataract Project.

Heintz was stunned by the selection — “This is an incredible competition, and these are amazing institutions doing incredible humanitarian work around the world.”

He said the recognition validates what the Himalayan Cataract Project has been working toward — helping the 18 million people who are blind from cataracts.

The contest drew 1,900 applicants. That field was narrowed to 800. And now there are just eight.

As the Waterbury Record reported in 2013, the Himalayan Cataract Project started drawing national attention with the publication that year of “Second Suns,” a book about the group’s two founders.

The book was written by the late David Oliver Relin, who also co-wrote the best-selling “Three Cups of Tea,” recounting one man’s efforts to build schools in Afghanistan.

Relin’s book details the growth of the unexpected but fruitful partnership between an exacting Nepalese eye surgeon, Sanduk Ruit, and his adventure-loving American counterpart, Geoff Tabin, an avid climber and mountaineer. The men met in 1995 in Nepal, where Tabin was visiting before taking his first post-training job at the University of Vermont.

The crucial technique

In the United States, cataract surgery is performed with an expensive machine that directs high-ultrasonic waves to dissolve the lens.

Ruit developed a way to remove and replace the clouded lens manually with little to no scarring. Critical to the technique’s success was the development of a sterile facility at Ruit’s hospital in Kathmandu where replacement lenses are made and shipped at low cost to 80 countries around the world.

With these lenses, a generator and a supply of sterile water, the surgeries can be performed equally well at a high-tech hospital or in a stone hut with no running water or electricity. The materials cost just $25, and a trained practitioner can do the surgery within seven minutes, allowing hundreds to be done in one day by a team of two.

In a controlled, double-blind study, a leading cataract researcher found that Ruit’s technique and the post-operative care he provides are just as effective as the Western method. The results were published in 2006 in the journal Ophthalmology.

Spreading the effort

From Waterbury, the Himalayan Cataract Project staff supports a cadre of surgeons who both perform the surgery and, even more important, train other doctors, nurses and health technicians in Ruit’s technique.

The semifinalist status is “just amazing to us,” Heintz said. “When you look at the other candidates, amazing humanitarian institutions. It’s just amazing to be in that company.”

Heintz explained the agency’s efforts:

“We work to overcome barriers impeding delivery of cataract care to underserved, needlessly blind people in the developing world. At the core of our work is our goal to achieve high-quality, low-cost eye care that can be sustained in the developing world for the long term.”

Heintz said the MacArthur Foundation will winnow down the eight semifinalists to five before picking the best applicant.

However, the foundation will work closely with the eight semifinalists to help them improve what they’re already delivering.

“MacArthur has decided to do is to work with each of us to perfect and improve the proposals,” he said. “What that means to us is that a relatively small nonprofit … will be working with the best experts in the world to reach scale.

“We think that if we can substantially train people in those places, we will have set the standard for how we can reach scale and to get the majority of those people around the world.

“What we want to do is keep growing the number of people who are examined and the number who are getting surgery. This is a continuation of what we’ve been doing for many years.”

The 8 semifinalists

Here’s a list of the eight semifinalists for a $100 million grant that’s part of an international competition sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation:

• Catholic Relief Services: Changing how society cares for children in orphanages

• HarvestPlus: Eliminating hidden hunger in Africa by fortifying staple crops

• Himalayan Cataract Project: Eliminating needless blindness in Nepal, Ethiopia, and Ghana

• Human Diagnosis Project: Providing virtual access to specialist medical care for underserved U.S. patients

• Internet Archive: Providing libraries and learners free digital access to four million books

• Rice University: Improving newborn survival in Africa

• Sesame Workshop and International Rescue Committee: Educating children displaced by conflict and persecution

• The Carter Center: Eliminating river blindness in Nigeria