About The Eye Fund
The Eye Fund aims to provide much needed counselling and aid to those who are losing their sight due to degenerative diseases, such as Retinal Cone Dystrophy, Cataracts, Diabetic Retinopathy, Retinitis Pigmentosa, Neurological Visual Impairment, Retinopathy of Prematurity as well as Age-Related Degeneration and other eye conditions.
We are a National Charity and with your help we can ensure counsellors in Ashville Lodge, St Paul’s Eye Hospital and Moorfields Eye Hospital and give us the opportunity to expand this help to other Eye Hospitals across the UK.
Every penny you can donate or minute of your time you can give will make a difference.
Please visit this section of the site if you’d like to get involved, or use our contact form to get in touch with us.
The reason for The Eye Fund: Simon Sherry
Simon Sherry was a smart and highly intelligent boy, but he lost his left eye in an accident, playing, when he was 8 years old. He didn’t allow this to get in the way of passing 13 “O” Levels at school or achieving a black belt in Wu Shu Kwan. Later, possibly due to the trauma of losing his eye, he developed Retinal Cone Dystrophy. This meant that not only was he losing his sight, his vision was very unpredictable and he struggled to cope.
Simon died aged just 39 in 2005.
Why are we raising funds?
Did you know that there are currently no paid counsellors for people who are losing their vision in the UK? We discovered this shocking fact while doing some research into where funds we were raising would be best spent.
Simon’s passion was graphic design, and even when his vision was poor he spent hours on his computer creating images based around the eye. These images are incredible, some clearly representing the eye, some are very abstract.
Optics 2008
As a family we wanted to share these wonderful images with others and raise money to help people where it is most needed. We thought a great way to do this would be to produce a calendar using Simon’s work.
Because we aren’t experts in this field we didn’t know where the money would be most needed so we arranged a meeting with Professor Alan Bird, Andrew Webster and Barbara Norton at Moorfields Hospital, London. This is where we learned about the lack of paid counsellors. We instantly knew that this is where our money needed to go. When we realised that just £40 would buy 1 hour of counselling for somebody like Simon it added a real urgency to our project.
We are really fortunate to have secured the support of Sir Paul McCartney who has underwritten the time of his publicist to help us produce a spectacular calendar and is writing a foreword. We are aiming to launch the calendar and The Eye Fund on October 10th 2007 to directly link in with World Sight Day on the 11th. In addition to selling the calendars it is our intention to use Simon’s work in a huge variety of ways. Some of the images cry out to be printed on silk, some would make beautiful greetings cards, while others will be taken on tour to a series of art galleries across the UK. This is just the beginning!
We have help from many unexpected sources and can’t begin to predict where it may go next. If you can help us by contributing towards an hour of counselling please do get in touch at pj.sherry@googlemail.com.
To purchase a calendar please see the calendar page.
We strongly believe that if this facility had been available to Simon, things would have been very different for him. To help us make that difference happen for others please do get in touch.