great story and i really enjoyed telling it back in one hundred seventy eight nearly thirty five years ago as dr larry brilliant who was working in the eradication of the smallpox in india  basically when when they completed that enormous task he and a group of friends were sort of looking for the next thing to do so larry called together some of his colleagues and long story short they decided to take on the issue of world blin so he pulled together other scientists and doctors but he also as a person who had been quite an activist through the sixty's and seventy's had a very eclectic relative x so he also invited rob das for example to join to be a found wavy gravy who's you know an icon right here in berkeley he ended up pulling together this very interesting group that was grounded not only in science but in spiritualism an activism and they decided their cause would be to eliminate needless blindness in the world then you need to name did say the savior is a sanskrit word it means selfless service and i think probably rom da had something to do with that name but the name stuck in we've been saved ever since in those founders are still very active they are indeed in fact wavy gravy is still an active board member he was in the office today his sort of board member for life we have a board but most boards where people get elected and but wavey is board member for life pretty much and that rahm das is still an honorary board member he lives in hawaii now so he's not close enough to come and go easily larry is still very involved although he's not on board but many of our advisors are still around from those early days larry became the c e o of google for  head of the google foundation that's right a few years ago and then he went on to become the president of the sco global threats fund which is where he he works today very active in and many other things still very much an activist and a great great supporter of say that to this day so now you're focused on the ninety percent of the people who are blind in the world or in what we call developing little clinic with nine beds and dr v as we call him came on the board and we consider him a founder as well so we got our start in india trying to provide support to dr and congresswoman who came up with this concept that you need to do high volume i care and high quality i care and serve the poor essentially free of charge but do such a good job that those who can afford to pay something will also come to your hospital and paying portion and then cross subsidizes the non paying portion and the formula has worked really beautifully not only in the art of in context they're now the largest eye care system in the world from nine beds founded in  six they now provide eye care services to over two million people a year and they do over two hundred thousand surgeries generators or jury can rack across the whole across the board and they won the gates foundation award a couple of years ago that when the hilton humanitarian award a couple of years ago so dr venkat of swami sort of introduced us or we helped each other in those early days to develop this model whereby those who can pay do but no one is ever turned away for lack of ability to pay so that a third pay for the two thirds in most countries where we work a third will pay something it may be a dollar or it may be twenty dollars there's a certain dignity in being able to pay something for your care but you know there are some folks who absolutely can't and it works it works very well across all the countries where we work we work on some variation of that model whereby those who can afford to pay something do last year save and then again were much smaller than the aravind eye care system and we work in many countries and focus a lot on training and helping across the board with management and many other restoring surgery as a direct result of funding that has gone out from save actually to our own programs or perhaps directly to a partner program and we have offices in the paul cambodian tibet with our own staff we still partner with local organizations but in places like india pakistan and egypt uganda youth e o p guatemala paraguay we've identified partners and we actually operate directly with those partners and don't go to the expense of creating an another twelve staff permanent staff oversees our budget fluctuates between three to five million dollars and in a given year we're an undoubted foundation so we have to go out and raise our money every single year and have some great concerts yes one of we do some innovative funded thing i will say for sure one in fifty percent of our funding comes from individual donors just like you and me people that believe in our cause and write a check every year but we have an honorary board member but the grateful dead played a major role in fundraising in the early years whenever saving needed additional money for their programs the dead would just go out and perform that spawn whole plethora of relations with the musical industry money ray jackson brown elvis costello to frank go on and on joan baez have done concerts for us over the years and we still do two or three concerts every year to generate awareness of the problem you know there are thirty nine million people in the world who are blind and the other two hundred seventy five million who are seriously visually impaired so concerts are a great way to spread the word that there's a big job for us to do out there and also raise money so the jobber means learned she has a lot more to do yes very much there's an organization an umbrella organization called vision two thousand and twenty and there's several dozen of us i organizations in the world and we try to work under that umbrella to coordinate our activities around the world and you know our goal our common goal is to eliminate unnecessary blindness and like you say ninety percent of it is in developing countries eighty percent of the folks who are blind in developing countries don't need to be either blind from preventable or curable conditions cataract become well cataract is the single largest cause of blindness and that's simply an opacity cation of the natural limbs in your eye and that can be caused by yes a lot of them are although in in the us we tend to perhaps age more slowly in some ways so cataract is a disease of people fifty and over it's a condition of fifty and over and maybe even later in many developing countries like india and tibet and that paul the onset of cataract is much earlier and there's there's there's not a clear evidence exactly why there's a lot of studies going on but i think people age more quickly they're exposed to more you ve they're much higher altitudes and some in some places but the result is very much higher incidence and prevalence of cataract it earlier ages the highest you know diseases they have and i conditions that are directly associated with exposure the thing about cataracts though is it's a fifteen minute operation and the average cost to our program where we do high volume  and high quality procedures is about fifty dollars so you know there's you know you're looking at eighteen million people in the world who for lack of a simple operation or access to basic i care are blind they don't need to be blind the rest of that thirty nine million you could have you know truck home you can have you know glaucoma macular degeneration there's a whole range of disease but many of those are also treatable in the same way well perhaps a more complex procedure or a longer procedure and the beauty of cataract is you remove the cataract and you implant artificial limbs the next day when the eye patch comes off the person can see and you're done and they will follow u obviously you want to make sure there's no post operative infection someone with glaucoma has to basically take medication for the rest of their life but it can be controlled in the progress of the disease can be stopped essentially by getting somebody under treatment and it's not terribly expensive so long as people have access to the medication now you also work with indigenous peoples here in the u s yes you have diabetes talking circle  tools that were there that was developed during the course of our work with than with native american populations early on probably three years after our founding  sent a delegation it's actually was a caravan of busses to the black hills in south dakota and there they met with some native american folks and because of this orientation toward service i mean we're not limited only to working in the field of blindness prevention they met with a group of native americans this group from save and were convinced that in our own country we have some very serious health disparities and so that launched an initiative to work with native american groups at the community and community level around a plethora of health issues over the years that is focused a little more and more in the area of chronic disease diabetes obesity heart disease that sort of things things that can be controlled through or improved through diet and education and exercise and other types of interventions so yes we have been  working very actively with native american communities across many of the states in the united states in this chronic disease arena which proves why we've worked in you know in alaska with the new it in south dakota with the coach here in oakland the second largest diaspora of urban based in native americans in the united states in oakland after chicago over one hundred thousand people have native a mate with native american heritage live in the oakland area they came here in the fifty's and sixty's when the federal government had a work program that essentially moved men initially off of the reservations into the oakland area for work and then their families followed in intially that created the sort of large large group from many many different reservations and native american groups around the u s and then with good times and bad you know that  created a large group of native american some doing quite well economically but others who are in the help so we work very closely with the native american community right in right in the bay area and how does talking circle work talk in circles essentially was taking a traditional native american practice where in a circle people would pass a pipe or some other  symbol that allows that person to speak and not be interrupted and it's a very old and and sort of treasured and wise way of allowing people to speak their mind  without fear of being interrupted or criticized in any way how many people i think it varies but only with the diabetes talking circle it would be however many people come in that particular evening but there's a certain stigma that is sometimes associated with having diabetes or people not wanting to speak out or for fear and by creating a way for people to say to sit together in a circle in the traditional native american way and to take the pipe or the symbol or whatever it is that in the case or the stick whatever it might be and know that they can speak their mind and without being criticized and without being interrupted became a great way for us to have people talk about their their disease or disease in their family or the impact on their family and for our health educators to also talk back with them about what can be done to address the disease how did you come about do you this was for many years we had a code a woman who works on our staff or name is laura lived a core group fantastic health educator  who from south dakota and she was the one who came up with this idea of using this traditional way of expressing yourself in a group dynamic and adapted it for diabetes education and for sharing amongst people so that people get you know get over their fear or the stigma that you know of of this particular condition and then learn from one another peer education and we you know we still do it to this day and we even have a web in our that's now available where if somebody can go and actually run a talking circle a local health educator can see how this works online and it's a it's been accepted by the  it seems like you have a technique of finding very simple technologies that work in spreading them indeed in terms of education and in terms of the actual direct services that we deliver  in terms of the site it has to be the highest quality i mean that's that's the key and that also trying to work in very high volume that way we can develop an affordable i care that serves the entire community without that paying portion it's difficult to have a sustainable program in in the native american context it's more adapting to and beliefs and mores that make sense you need to do culturally appropriate approach and we've always had native american folk on our staff as well are native american program is actually headed by you know a native american person and our interns and staff are very often a native american as well and headquarters so is the me challenge for you know ramping up  a large backlog of people who are blind for one reason or another in developing countries that even though we've made a tremendous amount of progress and we've reached over three million people which is pretty impressive for a small foundation that operates on a budget of less than five million dollars a year there's so much more to be done and so we're constantly trying to grow and partner and this is an ability approach that we take really focuses on enhancing the capacity of the partners that we select both with the native american work that we do we don't work independently we find a partner group and we try to enhance their capacity since they're going to be there you know hopefully forever and how much it cost to find a or a hospital you know for that matter because we have a program right now that has been recognized by the clinton global initiative which calls so one million eyes can see again and the whole concept is for us to replicate this model insight that we use whereby a certain portion pay and the rest you know are served at the highly subsidized rate or free of charge we're trying to get one hundred hospitals in developing countries around the world capacit  to really employ use this model and scale it up so you in essence could adopt a hospital because it's amazing how little it actually takes ten thousand dollars probably more like fifty thousand dollars over a few years because there's a lot of training involved there's a quick and involved sometimes their infrastructure has to be upgraded but when you think about it you may have a hospital that's doing five thousand surgeries a year that could easily do fifteen thousand surgeries if they could just get over a certain threshold technically infrastructure wise training wise so we try to facilitate that package that moves them over that level and so you get this explosion of big expansion of service for you know not a lot of not a lot of investment so our goal is to do that right now across one hundred smaller hospitals where i departments in developing countries and be able to enable them to do a trying to fill in the gaps so you have a gift card program someone can give one hundred dollars and give it to someone right we do it's called gift of service and it's an alternative giving program we have a beautiful little catalogue and hold array of gifts in this catalog and essentially to give you an example in instead of giving grandpa shirt and tie for christmas you can give fifty dollars which will enable us to do an operation for someone in the developing country restore their sight and grandpa receives a beautiful card from us saying that you know granddaughter jill has given him this is her gift for whatever holiday or to but it's not so it's a gift of service and you know how many people would love to have you know that sort of gift be given to them instead of something that's you know they may never use or may never aware and somebody gets help and another material objects and we generate probably about a quarter of our total revenue through that mechanism of people giving these type of gifts and you can sponsor an entire i can't you know where we may do three or four or five hundred you can sponsor a single home which is an operation it's fifteen thousand dollars and the average i can do this is a mobile i camp we actually go into remote community where they don't have access to an eye hospital and we'll we'll do an actual surgical i camp where we may do three four hundred surgeries and actually see several thousand patients with general i care we have a beautiful seven minute video that actually depicts what actually goes on and i'll share that with you some good so there's a there's probably thirty gifts in the catalog i don't know how many exactly we have this year some are native american focused and others are focused on our side program fifty dollars twenty five anything from twenty five dollars to even in full and if you just want to pack a cards even less than that up to you know fifteen thousand twenty thousand dollars and you could build a small i hospital if you really were so moved you know if you want to get a large enough gift but they're mostly mostly much more in the affordable range twenty five fifty dollars one hundred dollars two hundred dollars for a variety of things gender specific as well for people who are interesting and interested in helping women who interesting lee enough i should say three two thirds almost three quarters but around t between two thirds and three quarters of the blind people in the world are women and that's because they have less access to care and that's because they're less mobile by all and in many cultures if there's enough money in the family for someone to receive i care a and male w get it before athena will so we've found that by taking i care right into the village you really can erase a big part of that barrier and in most of our programs more than fifty percent of our patients are women because we focused on this gender inequity for a long time and we've been able to work our way through it but it's so we have gifts in our catalogs that are our focus towards ensuring that women also receive care or native american volunteers states an we have wonderful volunteers and you know we're in a more you tube sure we have been you can go right to our website because we are clinically focused for the most part in the on the i side of the equation it's hard for us to accept generous volunteers it's a little hard to place generous volunteers but certainly ophthalmologist i technicians nurse nurses really are instrumental in helping us train we don't need them to go and deliver the service so much of the actual eye surgery because our focus is on training but we do need them to help us train tibet not them ologist and the poly ophthalmologist especially in the sub specialty areas cataract they've got it down but if you're a retina specialist or if you're a nero ophthalmologist or you know if you're a pediatric ophthalmologist we still actively look for folks who can bring those services and who can work well in a different culture perhaps do a year of service which is a complete through change which could you use that doesn't happen on rare occasions most volunteers go for two or three weeks and they actually train they go into an environment where they're ready for them when they arrive and they work with local residents or local doctors so if you live in a very cynical of a month in very intense way interesting and a byproduct of that is a lot of surgery gets done but really the goal is that they're there to see much more sustainable if we can train local people that cataract surgeons in our programs abroad are actually much faster and do much higher volume than most surgeons do in the states so they actually in some  ways you know are better in that sense but cataract is you know a priest straightforward simple operation as it's a complicated case but in these sub specialty areas we we we recruit volunteers all the time