20 years of The Fred Hollows Foundation

The Foundation’s global work stems from the personality of an energetic and admired clinician, teacher and advocate

It’s quite simple really. The Fred Hollows Foundation is 20 years old. It started as Fred was dying from renal cancer. Fred was gifted and energetic and visionary but he had to hand the show over to colleagues, fundraisers and a handful of people who could organise things so that the intraocular lens (IOL) factories planned for Nepal, Eritrea and Vietnam could get built. In 1994, a year after Fred had lost his battle with cancer, two of those factories were built and continue to function today, producing more than 5 million lenses over the past two decades.