Jennifer Staples Receives Jefferson Award For Public Service

Unite For Sight is proud to announce that its founder, Jennifer Staple, is the recipient of the American Institute of Public Service’s 2009 National Jefferson Award For Public Service, which is known as the “Nobel Prize” for public service. Ms Staple is a Newtown native and the 1999 Newtown High School Valedictorian. She is currently a resident of New Haven.

 On June 16, Ms Staple was honored at the Jefferson Awards annual Gala Dinner and National Ceremony in Washington, D.C. She received the Samuel S. Beard Award for Greatest Public Service By An Individual 35 Years or Under. The Jefferson Awards were founded in 1972 by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, US Senator Robert Taft, and Sam Beard. Past national winners include former president Jimmy Carter, Oprah Winfrey, Jeffrey Sachs, Wendy Kopp, Joe Lieberman, and Bill and Melinda Gates.

 Ms Staple, a leading social entrepreneur, founded Unite For Sight from her dorm room at Yale in 2000. Nearly a decade later, Unite For Sight is the world’s leader in socially responsible, effective volunteering, and also a leader in providing high quality, cost-effective care to the world’s poorest people. Unite For Sight has provided eye care to more than 800,000 worldwide, including 23,000 sight-restoring surgeries to patients living in extreme poverty. Unite For Sight invests human and financial resources in the social ventures of local eye clinics to eliminate patient barriers to care. The organization applies best practices in eye care, public health, volunteerism, and social entrepreneurship to achieve high quality eye care for all.

 In 2007, Ms Staple won a $15,000 grant from Do Something, an organization that had previously awarded a $10,000 grant to her organization, Unite For Sight. The Brick Award and the larger Golden Brick Award helped her continue to help prevent blindness through the work of her 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

During her acceptance speech on June 16, Ms Staple emphasized that ideas, social entrepreneurship, and social investments can lead to systemic change. For those involved in public service, people are at the heart of the movement. “We are driven by a vision of innovation, of social entrepreneurship, and a passion to achieve global goals and to create a world that is better and with less suffering than today’s... We as a global community can harness our collective talent and idealism in order to achieve our global goals,” she said.