By Darby Kendall
The Elks Children’s Eye Clinic at the OHSU Casey Eye Institute has helped protect, improve and restore vision for tens of thousands of children and adults. Andreas Lauer, M.D., Margaret Thiele-Petti and August Petti Endowed Chair and director at the Casey Eye Institute, is proud of the institute’s work with children both at the Elks Eye Clinic and in rural Oregon communities.
Here are some highlights from Lauer speaking at a recent conference on pediatric eye care, the Casey Eye Institute’s Community Outreach Program, and the philanthropic support that makes them both possible.
Transcript
I’d love for you to just take a moment and think about how 40 to 50% of the neural input to your central nervous system to the brain comes from vision. And then there’s another 10 to 20% that’s responsible for taking that information and giving it meaning, giving us joy, giving us sadness. It gives us a reason to interact with the world as sentient beings. Vision is incredibly important.
The Elks Children’s Eye Clinic at the OHSU Casey Eye Institute has helped protect, improve and restore vision for tens of thousands of children and adults. Andreas Lauer, director and Margaret Thiele-Petti and August Petti Endowed Chair at the Casey Eye Institute, is proud of the institute’s work with children both at the Elks Clinic and in rural Oregon communities.
Here are some highlights from Dr. Lauer speaking at a recent conference on pediatric eye care, the Casey Eye Institute’s Community Outreach Program, and the philanthropic support that makes them both possible.
So, I want to tell a story about Aiden. She underwent gene therapy surgery for a rare, irreversibly blinding condition, a form of Leber congenital amaurosis. So, this is different from what we had done a few years previously. This was a new one.
She got treated in December of 2022. April of 2023, Mom, Aiden’s sister and Aiden are in the car. They live in Eastern Washington. It was snowing. They were running errands, and she was by the car, and for the very first time in her life, she was able to see snowflakes. Think about what that means for a teenager, and think about what that means for a mother. Pretty amazing stuff.
And the Oregon State Elks, they care about pediatric eye care for kids. It is their major project, for nearly 80 years. Every year they have given 80 years continuously, which is an amazing feat for philanthropy. So, what’s the result of that? We screen 6,000 to 8,000 preschool kids each year to check for visual abnormalities. And the thing that works for us is that we’re able to get them into local eye care at a higher rate than any other preschool vision screening program, such that the state wanted us to expand that, and the Elks have agreed to now fund childhood vision screening.
This just started. November 2025 was our first initiative at Seaside, because there’s kind of a vision care desert in the north coast of Oregon. So we started our first childhood vision screening, and then just recently, in collaboration with adult vision screening, we were in St. Helens, and the next is to go to Jefferson County, where there’s a lot of need and not much vision care, so that’s what we’re doing there.
We’re not just doing children’s outreach. We’re also having an outreach program that is 17 years old, I think, now, and this is a completely philanthropic initiative, where we had an initial mobile eye clinic, we have a second mobile eye clinic. The initial mobile eye clinic got reconfigured for the children’s screening at this point, and the adult one is a larger one.
And it’s not just the mobile eye clinic, but over those 17 or so years, we’ve established relationships with 97 community partners, and some of those visits that we do is in conjunction with Knight Cancer Institute, or the dental school, or with Pacific University, the optometry school. There’s this community-mindedness that has been part of our Eye Institute, that is part of OHSU. It’s part of our mission, and this is what we’re doing.
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