When Angie Rowe became president in 2019 of what was then called the Blind Children’s Learning Center, she decided the Santa Ana-based nonprofit needed to get some expertise from the corporate world.
She discovered that Orange County executives at some of the world’s leading cutting-edge companies to resolve eye problems were more than willing to help.
Last year, Rowe started an ophthalmic advisory board that now includes Caren Mason, chief executive of Lake Forest’s Staar Surgical Co. (Nasdaq: Staa); Michelle Allegretto, senior vice president of human resources at Glaukos Corp. (NYSE: GKOS) in San Clemente; and Raymond Kong, chief commercial officer at New World Medical Inc. in Rancho Cucamonga.
Tom Frinzi, a retired worldwide president of Johnson & Johnson Vision, is on the advisory board, as is that firm’s current VP of global strategic marketing, Negar Nikki Sidi. There’s also David Thoe, a VP of software-surgical instrumentation R&D at Alcon Inc.
The universities are also well representated with Catherine Heyman, assistant dean for student affairs at the Southern California College of Optometry at Fullerton’s Marshall B. Ketchum University, as are a pair of UCI experts: Sam Garg, medical director of the Gavin Herbert Eye Institute, and Rebecca Kammer, an optometrist who specializes in low-vision rehabilitation.
New Name
“Our first meeting last October did not go well,” recalled Rowe. “I remember saying afterwards that I hoped they’d come back.”
They did come back—with suggestions on how the organization could improve itself. Rowe focused on a couple of “simple things.”
One of those changes was in June when the nonprofit officially became Beyond Blindness.
“If you have a child with a lot of disabilities, including visual impairment, you might think we only treat blindness,” she said. “We have to think Beyond Blindness. It’s an aspirational approach to parents.”
Networking Families
The nonprofit was founded in 1962 by a group of blind individuals to provide services, particularly to young children.
In recent years, blindness as the primary or only disability has declined among children because conditions such as detached retinas or too much oxygen getting into the eye after birth are less today than compared to prior decades.
However, the ability to save more premature babies has also resulted in the increase in children who are globally delayed with blindness or visual impairments and other disabilities.
“This shift requires us to be able to address all their needs in addition to vision, thereby speaking again to one of the many reasons we changed the name,” Rowe said.
After Rowe arrived, the nonprofit school began focusing on three areas including an early intervention program for newborns to age 3 and an enrichment program for older children ages 3 to 22.
Its third program is to encourage networking among families spread throughout the county. Its first event attracted 60 attendees, then grew to 130 and its most recent event in July had over 450.
“They’re finding that when they come here, they’re meeting other families” with similar problems, Rowe said. “They don’t care how their kids behave because everyone is in the same situation.”
In the past fiscal year, the nonprofit served 302 children, with about 80% of them coming from families with low to moderate incomes and many who are in foster care. Rowe estimated as many as 3,500 children in Orange County could be affected by vision issues that may be obscured by other physical problems.
“For example, children with cerebral palsy often have visual issues as well,” Rowe said. “We know there are a lot more kids out there.”
A Boy’s Gaze
During a visit to the nonprofit’s leased facilities behind a church, Rowe showed a classroom with about half-dozen children ages 2 to 3 years old with various degrees of blindness.
“See that curly haired boy with his back to us? He’s completely blind,” she said. She softly called to another partially blind toddler, who eventually turned his head to gaze her way with a smile that would melt any heart.
About 80% of early learning in children under three years old comes from vision, Rowe said.
“When kids come with visual impairments, they are facing significant delays in development. They are two to three times behind their typical peers. By intervening, we see their developmental milestones being met sooner.”
$5M Budget Goal
The nonprofit’s board of directors also includes influential local executives, such as Chair Carol Trapani, SVP of advisory and transaction services at CBRE; Jeff Hipshman, a partner at EideBaily; and Jared Moriarty, managing director at McDermott + Bull Executive Search.
She credits another director, Kapil Malhotra, who is a senior business systems analyst at Newport Beach-based Pimco, for installing a new client management system that does the nonprofit’s scheduling.
“We got a guy from Pimco—pinch me!” Rowe exclaimed.
Beyond Blindness’ budget fell this past fiscal year to $2.6 million from $2.9 million in fiscal 2020. It has about 38 employees with plans to hire at least a dozen more in the coming year.
Her advisory board has encouraged her to seek a goal of $5 million annually within five years. The members have taught her how to craft packages to present to corporations that want to meet their goals for environmental, social and governance.
“They were instrumental in making sure we were on target when we reached out to companies,” she said. “They know what we need to tell these companies to make them want to get involved with us.”
Octane Accelerator
She also took the Octane nonprofit accelerator program, where she talked extensively to CEO Bill Carpou.
Rowe had to develop a pitch like what medtech companies offer when they are asking for investments.
“It helped us so much in honing our message and telling our story that would pull on your heartstrings—but also tell the story about our business,” she said. “That was probably the best experience that I’ve had.”
At an Octane summit, Rowe was impressed with the quality of the research, such as Menlo Park’s Avellino Labs USA Inc. that makes AvaGen, a leading personalized genetic eye test that quantifies the risk or presence of keratoconus and other corneal genetic disorders caused by gene variants. Its CEO is Jim Mazzo, a longtime executive in OC’s ophthalmology industry who is also chairman of Octane.
While the advisory executives are in the eye industry, their companies often sell products to older customers such as contact lens or glaucoma therapies for the elderly.
Still, they are in tune with the most recent cutting-edge ophthalmology research that could help the young children with vision problems, Rowe said.
For example, Ketchum’s Dr. Heyman introduced the nonprofit to innovative genetic testing from Spark Therapeutics, which has benefitted some of its students, Rowe said.
“They’ve been so generous with their time. They’re amazing. We love them.”
