Prevent Blindness Celebrates “Prevent Blindness Day” on June 1, the organization’s 115th Birthday

Prevent Blindness will be celebrating its 115^th birthday on June 1, 2023. The group is marking the occasion by declaring it as “Prevent Blindness Day.”

Prevent Blindness was founded in 1908, as the “Committee on Prevention of Blindness” under the previously-established New York Association for the Blind. In 1928, it was renamed the “National Society for the Prevention of Blindness,” and shortened to the “National Society to Prevent Blindness” in 1928. Then in 1978, the organization began doing business as “Prevent Blindness America,” which was later shortened to “Prevent Blindness.”

Established as a public health advocacy organization, the earliest Prevent Blindness volunteers were dedicated to eradicating a preventable form of blindness in newborns called ophthalmia neonatorum, also known as “babies’ sore eyes.” Through successfully leading legislation that mandated the application of sight-saving eyedrops (a solution of silver nitrate) at birth, the incidence of blindness due to babies’ sore eyes was reduced by 75 percent.

Over the next century, Prevent Blindness expanded by addressing eye safety in the work place in the mid-1950s during the industrial revolution, opening affiliate offices across the country, implementing the nation’s earliest screening programs for children and for glaucoma detection, focusing attention on vision population health research initiatives, advocating for increased government funding for vision and eye health programs at the state and national levels, and developing programs to support and create community among patients. Highlights from the history of Prevent Blindness may be found at PreventBlindness.org/our-history/.