Hollows Foundation Partnership Inspired By Personal Insight

Melbourne, Victoria

Melbourne-based e-bike importer TEBCO has announced a partnership with the Fred Hollows Foundation, inspired by managing director Tony Morgan’s personal experience with restorative eye surgery.

TEBCO has pledged to provide $25 to the foundation for every e-bike and electric trike it sells – both wholesale and retail.

“As little as $25 can restore sight to a person who is needlessly blind or vision impaired,” Tony says in a statement issued by TEBCO last week.

“The gift of sight is quite precious to me personally. I was born with cataracts on both eyes.”

The Fred Hollows Foundation was founded in 1992 by eye surgeon Professor Fred Hollows, shortly before he died of cancer.

It was established to continue Fred’s work treating and preventing blindness and other vision problems, and operates in more than 25 countries around the world including Australia, South East Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

“The gift of sight is quite precious to me personally. I was born with cataracts on both eyes,” Tony reveals.

“At age five years, I had operations to remove the cataracts and then wore extremely thick glasses for 30 years.

“With the development of quality soft contact lenses in the mid 1980s, I was able to dispense with thick glasses and wear contacts. Then in 1995, I again had surgery where I had secondary implants of plastic lenses sewn into the back of my eyes which restored my sight to a position where I no longer needed glasses or contact lenses.

“I cannot express strongly enough how precious the gift of sight is.”

Tony said through the new partnership, TEBCO and its valued resellers could not only continue to entrench e-bikes into the day-to-day activities of mainstream Australian, they could also “restore the precious gift of sight to thousands of Australian and overseas children and adults”.

According to statistics included in the TEBCO statement:

• Nine out of 10 people who are blind or vision impaired don’t need to be
• There are currently 43 million people around the world who are blind and 1.1 billion live with some form of vision loss
• About 90% of those affected live in low-income and middle-income countries
• By 2050, it’s estimated more than 61 billion people will be blind because of the growing and ageing population (an increase of 41%)