A Letter from the Be My Eyes Foundation President
If you’re reading this you are likely one of nearly 11 million people who have signed up to be a Be My Eyes volunteer. Thank you! You are part of the world’s largest digital volunteer network. You have helped blind people – like me – elegantly get information and productivity in our daily journeys at work, school or play.
Public service technologies like the precious network Be My Eyes, which has operated over 14 years, are so essential to over 1 million blind people that we’ve now built an enduring way to keep it strong and expanding. The Be My Eyes Foundation was created earlier this year to spur outreach to the blind of the global south, to accelerate invention of new technologies that help with remote visual description, and to ensure that blind people will always be just a click away from the valuable assistance you provide them.
The Be My Eyes Foundation is a new nonprofit organization created to secure funding for a permanent charitable endowment for blind access technologies. You know, over its entire history Be My Eyes has never asked its blind users or volunteers to help financially with their operational costs. Nor have they received any government grants. Instead, up until now they have relied on corporate funding to keep Be My Eyes running. It’s been essential, but it’s not quite enough for our Foundation’s blind ambition. We aspire to create blind-friendly access technologies that don’t yet exist and to spread them, well, everywhere there are blind people. We will not shrink from the challenge to create the best volunteer and AI services available 24/7, always free to the blind user.
So that’s where you come in. Won’t you join the Be My Eyes Foundation and consider a contribution to accelerate our technology and outreach? It’s quite easy: just go to www.bemyeyesfoundation.org and share some of that philanthropic spirit I see every time I use Be My Eyes.
As a blind guy myself, I thank my lucky stars every time I work with a volunteer to identify an ingredient, help with electronic equipment or pick out a snazzy outfit. Every day you help fulfill the promise of humanistic technology.
In coming months I look forward to sharing some of the Foundation’s accomplishments and the reasons they will make such a difference to the world’s 340 million blind citizens.
Kind regards,
Bryan Bashin
President
The Be My Eyes Foundation