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Mar 13, 2007

"We're here for a reason. I believe a bit of the reason is to throw little torches out to lead people through the dark." --Whoopi Goldberg

19-year-old Tackles Global Blindness

Six years ago, 19-year-old college sophomore Jennifer Staple started "Unite for Sight", a nonprofit with a staff of one: herself. It began with the recruitment of a few fellow Yale University students to join her mission against blindness among the homeless of New Haven, Conn., and has since burgeoned into the recruitment of thousands worldwide. From her dorm room on the Stanford campus where she’s now a second-year medical student, Staple volunteers 40 hours a week for Unite for Sight and coordinates some 4,000 volunteers. The organization now has 90 chapters in 25 countries. Providing services to 400,000 low-income patients, it has sponsored more than 6,000 sight-restoring surgeries, a number that continues to grow weekly. Staple herself has plans of becoming an ophthalmologist someday.