History of Miami Lighthouse

A HISTORY OF BUILDING INDEPENDENT FUTURES AND A MORE INCLUSIVE SOCIETY

In the late 1920s, blind activist Dolly Gamble enlisted the Miami Lions and Miami Rotary clubs to help the blind achieve independence. From their efforts, the Florida Association of Workers for the Blind, which would later be called Miami Lighthouse, was born. Nearly a century later, we are Florida's largest nonprofit providing hope, confidence, and independence to the blind and visually impaired of all ages. Originally a 900-square-foot bungalow house in the 1930s, Miami Lighthouse's facility now encompasses over 150,000 square feet of space dedicated to education, training, research and vision enhancement.

Recognized by Charity Navigator among their elite top 1% nonprofits for our excellence in efficient use of donor support and financial strength as we serve our program participants, we transform the lives of 90,000 blind and visually impaired individuals and their families annually from babies to seniors and schoolchildren in underserved communities statewide who fail their vision screening.

Today, the impact of our programs is statewide, national, and international:

• As a leader in inclusion, we have counseled presidential campaigns, state election boards and corporations on accessible website design.
• Our Florida Heiken Children's Vision Program, cited by the American Optometric Association as a national model other states should adopt, provides comprehensive eye exams and prescription glasses for underserved schoolchildren throughout Florida by taking primary eye health care directly to Title 1 schools using our fleet of mobile eye care units.
• Our Academy early learning innovative inclusion model benefits students beyond the classroom with University of Miami research showing improvements in social and emotional development for both sighted and visually impaired children, which far exceeds the national average.
• Our Blind Babies Early Intervention and parenting programs, including our Parents' play days with their blind toddlers, promote a stronger family unit.
• Our Cortical Visual Impairment (CVI) Collaborative Center is addressing the number one cause of pediatric visual impairment in developed and developing countries by working to improve diagnosis and timely treatment of CVI.
• Our "Living with Low Vision" presentations on YouTube educate our elderly population on the most common age-related eye conditions
  such as macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma and cataracts and help seniors with limited resources improve the quality of their life.

Miami Lighthouse has always valued collaboration. In the late 1920's, soon after Helen Keller exhorted the Lions Club to be "knights for the blind," a dedicated group of Floridians, led by Thomas Grady, who enlisted the Lions Club, and Dolly Gamble, a remarkable, young, blind activist and promoter of Braille literacy, worked together to found the Florida Association of Workers for the Blind. During the Depression, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, Mrs. Charles Brickell, and Mrs. Harvey Firestone, among other notables, hosted garden party fundraisers. Today, we continue to ensure our clients can take their place in the workforce and lead productive, fulfilling lives. We do this through: our GED and ESOL classes for adults, offered in collaboration with Miami-Dade County Public Schools Adult Education; our nationally recognized music inclusion program, which trains students from Miami and around the world for employment in the music industry; and our job-readiness training program that prepares teens and adults for mainstream, competitive, integrated employment.

A HISTORY OF COLLABORATION

As early as 1943, University of Miami Trustee Dr. Bascom Palmer and Miami Lighthouse discussed establishment of an eye clinic to serve the local community. Dr. Palmer made it his life's work to raise funds and support for the eye hospital in cooperation with Miami Lighthouse, and finally, the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute was dedicated in 1962. Six years later, Miami Lighthouse contributed substantial funds to build a hospital to house the Institute. A strong collaboration between Miami Lighthouse and Bascom Palmer Eye Institute continues to this day, as both institutions transform lives through vision-related services and research.

As part of our education mission, Miami Lighthouse partners with academe on continuing education "Living with Low Vision" workshops for Occupational Therapists and Physical Therapists. In collaboration with universities throughout the U.S., nearly 100 occupational therapy and orientation and mobility students have completed their on-campus practicum experience at Miami Lighthouse.

Miami Lighthouse also contracts with the School Board of Miami-Dade County Public Schools (the third largest school district in the U.S.) for our birth to two pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, first and second grades and for providing itinerant service and functional vision and learning media assessments for M-DCPS students, Braille transcribing, Braille music distance learning, Adult Basic Education/GED, English as a Second Language for visually impaired adults, and the Florida Heiken Children's Vision Program.

Our mission statement is: "Through education, training, research and vision enhancement, Miami Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired provides hope, confidence, and independence to people of all ages." To carry out our mission, we will continue to innovate, to work to meet the needs of people of all ages affected by a visual impairment and to provide exemplary education and vision rehabilitation for our program participants and transparency and accountability to our donors.