VANCOUVER, British Columbia.— CoastalContacts.com and ClearlyContacts.ca, the global internet retailer based here, has established a new charitable initiative, called Change the View Project. The company said it will expand its previous donation efforts and will now donate one pair of eyeglasses for every pair of private label eyeglasses purchased to needy people around the world. In its statement, ClearlyContacts said it aims to distribute 250,000 pairs of eyeglasses globally by the end of this year and hopes to donate more than two million pairs of eyeglasses by 2020.

Terry Vanderkruyk, vice president of corporate development for Coastal Contacts, said, in response to a query from Vision Monday, “Coastal Contacts Inc. (ClearlyContacts.ca and CoastalContacts.com) has donated glasses to a variety of vision related initiatives in Canada, Mexico, Guatemala and Haiti since 2010. As a result of these philanthropic initiatives we wanted to create a more cohesive program that would allows us and our customers to help those who cannot afford glasses or the most basic vision care.

“We launched the Change the View Project (registered charity) earlier this year and have been in discussion with a number of vision care charitable organizations about supporting our program as an international partner and distributor.”

 
He added, “We are focusing on a grassroots oriented strategy that will look to establish partners on a project-by-project and country-by-country basis across the world in order to meet our targets. We actively manage the program at our headquarters with a group of volunteers who work to seek out partners and recipients and coordinate the distribution of our glasses. Our goal is to make our program available to groups around the world through our CoastalContacts.com (USA) and Clearly.Contacts.ca (Canada) websites initially and then to extend through our larger family of websites in other countries in the future.

For more info, contact Change the View Project at: changetheview@coastalcontacts.com. ■