I am Jon Michael Douglas, an upcoming senior at the University of Mississippi, a CEED scholar, and the intern at the Mississippi Vision Foundation over the past six weeks. I applied and was accepted to CEED in my sophomore year of college. CEED is part of the Grisham-McLean Institute at the University of Mississippi. CEED stands for Catalyzing Entrepreneurship and Economic Development, and the goal is to fight poverty in Mississippi through education and healthcare. All the students in CEED are required to work an internship over the summer. With my dreams of one day being an optometrist, and CEED’s goals of increasing education and healthcare throughout the state, I knew there was no better place for me to do my internship than with the Mississippi Vision Foundation.

When the MVF accepted me to be their intern Sarah Link knew there would be three main tasks I would work on over the summer. These were the 3rd Grade Eye Exam Program, the Jackson Free Clinic, and Vision Mississippi. Those three things would not be the only work I would do with the MVF. I also would go to the MOA’s summer conference in Gulf Shores to run the MVF table at the convention, and assist with the conference overall.

The first project I began working on was the 3rd Grade Eye Exam Program. Due to Covid-19 the program had been on hold for two years, because the state was did not conduct the vision assessments in 2020 and 2021. In 2023, the second year the assessment was administered after Covid-19, the need for the program was worse than ever with roughly 26% of children failing to pass the standardized literacy test. Past statistics showed that 88% of children who received eye exams through the program were found to need some form of visual intervention. My work with the program was to sign up new OD volunteers, communicate and verify existing volunteers, and update the MVF website with the newest information about the optometrists who participate in the program.

Vision Mississippi is a new-ish program with the MVF that allows underserved people to be connected with a local optometrist through a rural health clinic, and then get an eye exam at no cost to the patient. My goals for working on Vision MS were to find as many rural clinics as possible in Mississippi, and to find new optometrists to volunteer with the program. I was able to find information on 55 rural health clinics across the state that we hope will choose to participate in Vision MS.

My main project for the summer was the Jackson Free Clinic’s vision lane. The Jackson Free Clinic is run by students at UMMC, and is free to low income, uninsured patients. The JFC has been able to offer multiple different forms of healthcare to their patients, but they have been lacking vision care for quite some time. Jordan Coggins, a third-year med student and the Specialty Services Development Director for the clinic, reached out to the MVF Board. With the help of Dr. Walter Pang and the MVF Task Force, they were able to get a much-needed vision lane operating at least once a month at the Jackson Free Clinic. The goal for my work with the JFC was to find enough optometrists willing to volunteer so that the vision lane could be open enough to match the community needs. To do this I visited lots of y’all’s offices in the Jackson area and I also talked about the JFC vision lane during the MOA’s summer convention.

I was extremely blessed to get to work at the MOA’s summer convention in Gulf Shores. Not only was I able to spread the word about different ways optometrists could volunteer across the state, but I was able to meet so many amazing people. I was shocked by how encouraging everyone was and how willing everyone was to help me in any way they could.

I have been extremely fortunate to get to do this internship with the MVF. I know that I will always be able to look back at this time and know that it greatly helped me get to where I hope to be some day.