Bloomberg Philanthropies expands free school eye care to seven more US cities

On 24 September 2026 Bloomberg Philanthropies and the nonprofit Vision To Learn announced an $8.4 million investment to bring school-based vision care to seven new American cities during the 2026-2027 school year: Bakersfield and Riverside in California, Columbus in Ohio, Madison in Wisconsin, Philadelphia, Sarasota in Florida, and Des Moines in Iowa. Children will receive free vision screenings, eye exams and, where needed, glasses at school, with eyewear company Warby Parker supplying glasses in some locations through its Pupils Project. The effort could reach as many as 50,000 students.

The expansion builds on a first year in which more than 10,000 children in Boston, Newark, Washington, D.C., and the Baltimore area received new glasses through the programme. Vision To Learn, founded in 2012 by Austin Beutner, runs mobile clinics that visit schools in low-income neighbourhoods; most of the children it serves live in poverty. The organisers point to estimates that around 80 percent of a child's learning in the first twelve years is visual, and that children with uncorrected vision problems are more likely to repeat a grade and to fall behind in reading.

The school programme is part of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Vision Initiative, launched in 2025 to tackle the fact that roughly a billion people worldwide live with vision impairment that could be corrected with simple measures. According to the foundation, the initiative has so far committed $88 million and, working with partners in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria and the United States, has distributed more than a million pairs of glasses, carried out 6.4 million screenings and paid for more than 114,000 cataract operations. Inside Philanthropy reported that the funder expects to reach its targets of 11.5 million screenings and 250,000 sight-restoring surgeries by the end of 2027.

Michael Bloomberg, founder of the financial data company Bloomberg L.P. and a three-term mayor of New York City, grew up in a Jewish family in Medford, Massachusetts. His foundation, which encompasses all of his giving, says it distributed $4.3 billion in 2025, with public health among its largest areas of work.