GHASWALA VISION FOUNDATION – CHALLENGES FACED SUCCESSFULLY & STRATEGIES IMPLEMENTED

Mr Percy Ghaswala, our last speaker for the day narrated his two decades journey, challenges and opportunities with the Ghaswala Vision Foundation, a charitable trust the foundation supports various activities related to eye care and blindness in general, but the main focus of the foundation is to fight corneal blindness.  He briefed some the challenges faced by his organization which is also the common problem of any Non-Profit organization during its early days. In the early days of Ghaswala Vision Foundation some its problems were, it had FCRA Violation, Beneficiaries Pay was squeezed, unorganized work culture, patient pile up, and lack of domain expertise. However, there was one silver lining “Reversible Blindness” the cause for which the organization worked was extremely gratifying.

To overcome these challenges, they developed clarity of thought like adapt to change, ready to learn, acknowledge mistakes. He highlighted if an organization who want to bring about change there are two things they have to concentrate on (i) Advocacy and (ii) Ground Work.  During the journey of Ghaswala Vision Foundation they have filed numerous RTI’s, court appeals, PIL (Public Interest Litigation) and 1 writ petition. PIL exposes dark holes in the system. They also developed strong Ground work by networking with other non-profits, hospitals, surgeons who has the common passion for social impact and also they implemented KYP (Know Your Patient).

The way forward for Ghaswala Vision Foundation is to have Corpus Creation, Cloud based database of GVF patients and Succession Plan/Scaling. The uniqueness of GVF is Non-Profit with ONLINE Presence and motto of the organization is to restore vision of abandoned poor who suffer form “Reversible Blindness”.

About – Percy Ghaswala

Percy Ghaswala is the Founder Trustee of Ghaswala Vision Foundation. Holding a Bachelor of Science with Biochemistry/Chemistry and Master of Science in Biochemistry from the University of Mumbai. He has a diverse professional work experience in various organizations in an advisory roles. He is also an author of numbers journal articles and a member of numerous Professional organizations. His Fellowships and Honours include Predoctoral Fellow, Department of Science & Technology, New Delhi & Wellcome Trust, UK, Fellow, International Federation of Eye & Tissue Banks, Baltimore, USA.