October 30, 2008
By Hannah Wolfson, News staff writer
Stephen Black, a Birmingham lawyer and director of the Center for Ethics and Social Responsibility at the University of Alabama, has won a $125,000 award for creating FocusFirst, a statewide vision screening program for poor children.
Black is one of 10 people to receive the nationwide Community Health Leaders Award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which received more than 800 nominations. He received the award Wednesday.
Black said that $20,000 of the money goes to him, and the remaining $105,000 will be used to expand the FocusFirst program.
FocusFirst trains college students from across the state to conduct vision screenings for preschool-aged children in low-income rural and urban areas.
Since the program started in 2004, the group has screened more than 40,000 children in all of Alabama’s 67 counties. Of those, 5,000 failed the screenings and were referred for follow-up care.
“Stephen’s success in delivering high-quality vision care services to low-income families in our community represents a tremendous contribution to our state, and serves as a shining example of servant leadership for others to follow,” Torrey Smitherman, executive director of the EyeSight Foundation of Alabama, said in a news release.
Black said using college students is the key to the project’s success. So far, 1,000 students from 20 schools have participated.
“I think the capacity for an organization based on the compassion and dedication of college students and young college graduates is limitless,” he said Wednesday. “I hope this award helps us become a national example of what college students are doing.”
Black is working on expanding outside Alabama with a new program in Philadelphia, where students from the University of Pennsylvania, his alma mater, have screened 400 children.
His nonprofit organization, ImpactAlabama, also runs initiatives that provide free tax preparation for low-income residents and runs a debate program for the Birmingham schools.
E-mail: hwolfson@bhamnews.com
