The association's office was held at headquarters to discuss the programs to be implemented in Benin, Guinea and Senegal for the year 2020. These are the subject of annexes. The Bureau also deliberated on the following subjects:
1 – PARTNERSHIP
Thierry CALDERON
We were contacted by Thierry Calderon, who is an optician in Avignon and who has no less than 6 stores and 40 employees. Thierry wants to carry out a motivational challenge with a humanitarian purpose for his teammates. A bit like the one we have in progress with the Solidarité HK Challenge by Olivier HESTEAU and Serge KLIENKOFF. We provided personalized information to Thierry, which allowed him to present our structure and our actions to all of his staff. It is now a question of starting the challenge by providing it with visibility for its employees and proposing a specific project. The Bureau decided to assign Senegal to this new partner. The essential reason being that starting from a center to be created, it is more motivating for Calderon to be able to follow its start-up and its development without other external stakeholders, and, for us, to ensure that the same type of volunteers will intervene on a recurring basis. within our local team with the same working methodology. It is now a question of resuming contact with Thierry, of defining with ADM the mission possibilities for 2020, and of timing the availability of volunteer opticians as best as possible to block the dates of the rotations in Matam.
The ESSILOR Foundation
We were contacted by Damien MOTTEAU who represents the Essilor Foundation in West and Central Africa. He took over from Lucie DURAND who was based in Abidjan, and who had already contacted us for the same reason. The Essilor Foundation had spotted our programs in West Africa and was keen to know how it could help us. As is often the case in this type of spontaneous partnership, there was never a response to Lucie's first request and we had no information on the Foundation's arrangements to work with us. Also, during contact with Damien, we were clear about our expectations. He presented us with the Vision for Life program, created by Essilor, which is nothing more and nothing less than a central purchasing center for low-cost optical products for humanitarian structures like ours. After this “commercial” chapter, we have arrived at the essentials and the very nature of the partnership that could bind us. Two avenues are open to us: – ask Essilor to help us equip the AMSO with a complete assembly line with automatic grinder, precision grinder, centerer, automatic feeler, groover, automatic fronto… This would be done on the horizon end of 2020, or even beginning of 2021. This equipment would allow AMSO to exit the Make it Easy protocol to become autonomous in the production of corrective glasses. – The second avenue to explore with Essilor is the supply of ophthalmic lenses for our centers. Particularly for that of AMSO which, if it acquires an assembly line, will not have difficulty in supplying frames of which we have a large number at the headquarters in Marseille but will be obliged to stock up on lenses of different diopters. The file is therefore being studied at headquarters with Nicolas and Lionel. It will be submitted to Damien by email awaiting a response which we can only hope will be fairly quick from them!
The KRYS Foundation
Apart from its annual assistance in financing our actions, the KRYS Group Foundation is interested in the involvement of members of its 3 brands in international humanitarian missions. We have submitted a file to them proposing the voluntary participation of opticians in our training activities. A little differently from the Solidarité HK Challenge, the Foundation would not set up an internal motivation operation but would broadcast on its internal communications network a call for volunteers based on criteria that we will set for it. The financing of the actions is to be clarified with Pierre GERINI, the president of the Foundation, but most certainly it would assume the largest part. It is therefore understood that we will involve the volunteer opticians from the network in our training sessions in Benin. As this operation will be implemented slowly during 2020, we plan to only be able to count on these volunteers during the 2nd half of the year. Following the association meeting organized each year by the KRYS Foundation in Paris in January, Nicolas will meet Pierre and Mathieu GUEGUIN in order to finalize the cooperation formalities for these training courses.
GAUTIER optics
Optique Gautier is a group of opticians based in Marseille and with 4 stores. Gautier was approached by the headquarters of our association then by Lionel for his part to ask him if he was interested in the actions that we are setting up with the Make It Easy protocol of the Codir. Claire LENOUVEL met Father Gautier who agreed to be the interface between the measurement sheets of the MIE protocol, recorded in the field and the Codir. For a while now, it seemed essential to us to have someone who checks the veracity of the manufacturing sheets before transmitting them to the Codir. We will create an internet address that will allow us to send team requests directly from Guinea or Benin to Gautier. And we will ensure that Codir goes through Gautier again when the equipment is delivered so that he can check that the frames manufactured correspond to the information that was sent to them. Claire and Nicolas must quickly reconnect with Gautier to finalize this agreement and communicate to Codir the existence of this partner in the protocol that binds us to them.
2 – DEVELOPMENT
We had contact from Dr Joséphine ALTERAC who works with Laurent ROUX at the European hospital in Marseille. Joséphine wanted to get involved in humanitarian action and met Patricia MOWBRAY, president of the Racine d'Enfance association based in Senegal.
This association aims to create school groups and canteens. Patricia would also like to carry out school ophthalmological screening of children who attend the association's 12 establishments. When Joséphine and Patricia spoke, it appeared that Joséphine lacked experience both in humanitarian work and in the conditions of practicing ophthalmology in West Africa. Nicolas contacted Joséphine and Patricia to agree on the following operation: Racine d'enfance does not have a school center in Matam. On the other hand, VLV is not able to invest in any region other than that of Matam. However, the idea would be to allow Joséphine to gain initial experience in the field of school screenings so that she can then join Patricia in her own actions. The aim will be to schedule a school screening mission at our home in Matam in partnership with Dr. Diallo's team from Ourossogui hospital.
If it suits Joséphine, she could integrate the school screening mission of November 2020 in Guinea within AMSO since it is the one which will be the most advanced to allow her to acquire certain techniques and discover the African humanitarian universe alongside Hawa SOUMAH. Following which Joséphine should have sufficient elements to be able to duplicate our methodology in Senegal on behalf of the Racines d'Enfance association.
3 – NEW ADMINISTRATOR
Amandine LEPAGE has been co-opted as administrator of our association. She will take the place of Julien CERDAN, who resigned. His appointment is immediate, it will be put to the vote and ratified at the next ordinary general meeting of our association. Amandine will be in charge of developing the training program and our optical center in Senegal. This Administrator status is dictated by two motivations on our part:
• Allow it to carry the word of the association and to have the necessary recognition to take local measures.
• Offer her a more official and lasting dimension in the administration of our association given her remarkable involvement since her first mission alongside us and the passion she puts into investing in our activities.
During the next board meeting of the association we will ask Fabienne PENTAGROSSA if she also wishes to join our Board of Directors and allow us to benefit from her enthusiasm for our optical center in Matam. It will be a valuable element in preparing future optician volunteers who will form our local team.
4 – DONATIONS OF MOUNTS
The recovery of the stock of unsold frames from stores in the KRYS network during 2019 allows us to total nearly 5,000 donated pairs today. Mathieu GUEGUIN from the Krys Foundation told us of his desire to grant us a significant quantity of frames from a manufacturer. We are talking about 4,500 new pairs. This will therefore total the number of frames collected this year to 10,000.
2 questions arise:
– Should we accept Mathieu’s proposal (and do we really need it)?
– Knowing that the number of donors increases each year and knowing that we collected 4,500 pairs in 2019, it is expected that we will be able to count on at least the same allocation for 2020 or even more. It is a question of organizing the logistics around these donations. First the storage space which will start to pose problems in our current premises and then the inevitable sorting which will have to be done of all of these frames to allocate them according to their typology and the needs which are ours on the ground.
Lionel recommends accepting the Foundation's donation and Claire offers to do a few sorting sessions with her friends. Nicolas will contact Claude, the owner of the premises we are currently renting, to ask him if it is possible for him to rent us the small premises on the ground floor, which would save us from handling boxes on the first floor and which would give us a little more space to sort.
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