Vision Care for Needy Children

Dear Donors,

Thank you GlobalGiving donors for your generous support this year!  Several donors have set up recurring donations and we appreciate this ongoing support. Thank you, too, for helping us to continue to provide vision and hearing care for all eligible children requesting our help!!  As we mentioned in last year’s report, in addition to meeting our goal the KEX Kids Fund had been selected to receive a National Outstanding Service Award from the NAB Education Foundation for Service to Children presented in Washington DC on June 16, 2015!!  In addition to this National Award, the KEX Kids Fund received local recognition by the Oregon Lions Sight and Hearing Foundation as their Partner of the Year at their Gala Award Dinner on October 3, 2015.  Thank you again for your help to make this recognition possible!

In 2017 your support helped us raise $220,877.61 (including payments from our November 2017 pledge drive received in January 2018) to provide both hearing and vision care for needy children in Oregon and SW Washington.  Most of our operating expenses for 2018 were pledged and collected during our annual Thanksgiving Fundraiser.  These funds will be used for our $175,000 budget for 2018.  We are very pleased with this support as the radio time for the fundraiser included only the four morning broadcasts and not the two afternoon commuting time broadcasts that have historically brought in $15,000 to $20,000 in pledges.  Our funds are kept in one account and are used for both of our Hearing and Vision Care programs. 

We also added four counties in Oregon and Washington to our vision and hearing programs:  Crook County in Oregon to Vision Care and Lane County in Oregon to Hearing Care; Klickitat and Walla Walla Counties in Washington to Hearing Care so that we now serve children in 24 counties in Oregon and SW Washington.

Vision Care Program Services expenses 2017 were $61,080 and the KEX Kids Fund received requests from 978 children.  These KEX Kids Fund children received vision care services valued at over $300,000.

We continue to be concerned about reaching children who have vision problems and whose families qualify for our help (on free or reduced-price lunch programs).  School districts in Oregon depend upon the Oregon Lions Sight and Hearing Foundation to provide vision screening for their students.  Funding this program is becoming a challenge and the KEX Kids Fund Board is expanding our partnership with OLSHF to help them continue to provide screening to districts without the resources to fund the screening program.  In response to a proposal from OLSHF, at our April, 2017 board meeting, we voted to contribute $25,000 to OLSHF to help them provide the Mobile Health Screening Program (MHSP) to districts that lack local resources to share in the cost of providing this service to their students.  At our October board meeting, OLSHF reported that they provided screening at 600 sites in 2016. About 177,344 children were screened resulting in referrals for 19,330 children for additional vision care.  See attachments for the OLSHF report and budget.

Thank you again for helping us to bring sight to needy children in Oregon and SW Washington.