Major Projects of District 12-N

The following projects are supported by the Lions Clubs in District12-N.

East Tennessee Lions Eye Bank is located in UT Hospital, 1924 Alcoa Highway, U-26. The facility is the major clearing house between persons donating eyes after death and recipients of corneal transplants. It also conducts programs of public awareness, professional education, and research.The ETLEB has been ranked among the top ten eye banks in the world!

The Tennessee unit of Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic is located in Oak Ridge. Recordings are done on request from students and professionals and are on loan to 80,000 registered visually and print-impaired borrowers. The unit is located at 205 Badger Road in Oak Ridge. The Outreach program supports Tennessee school systems in providing classroom material for students with print disabilities.

The Tennessee School for the Deaf in Knoxville receives funds to help students needing hearing devices, medicine, eye glasses, shoes, clothing, and other personal items. Funds also support a summer camp program.

At the Tennessee School for the Blind in Donelson, special Christmas checks are presented to the students each year, and needy students are provided with clothing and necessities. Students at the school for visually impaired children near Nashville also receive funds from District 12-N Lions Clubs.

Lions Volunteer Blind Industries in Morristown is owned and operated by the Lions of District 12-N. The mission is "...to provide persons who are blind with meaningful services and employment opportunities leading to maximum personal and economic independence with dignity." It has an evaluation and training center, and it provides employment at competitive wages for blind workers. The Opportunity East rehabilitation center in Morristown helps visually and physically handicapped adults gain independence through specialized training; a dormitory is available for trainees.

Lions World Services for the Blind is located in Little Rock, Arkansas, and supported by Tennessee Lions. It is a comprehensive rehabilitation center for blind adults providing counseling for emotional and psychological adjustment to blindness, training in independent living and mobility skills, vocational evaluation, and high quality, marketable job skills training.

Leader Dogs for the Blind in Rochester, Michigan, is supported by the Lions of District 12-N. Leader Dogs provides guide dogs for the blind.Many local Lions Clubs will help provide transportation to Leader Dog. Expert trainers work for two months with each potential guide dog, and then the blind recipient lives in a dormitory for a month to learn how to work with the dog.

Because diabetes is one of the leading causes of blindness, Lions support the Juvenile Diabetes Association both through financial support and cooperative efforts to educate the public. Lions support early detection of Juvenile and Adult diabetes, a disease that affects about 12 million Americans and causes about 300,000 deaths each year.

The Direct Braille Slate was developed in East Tennessee, and is a manual guide for writing Braille from left to right on top of paper, rather than the traditional method.

Tennessee Lions Eye Center Outreach: Lions all across Tennessee have teamed up with the Department of Opthalmology at Vanderbilt Children's Hospital with the goal of providing quality eye care for children statewide. Lions Clubs raised over $4 million for a project that created the Tennessee Lions Eye Center (TLEC) at Vanderbilt Children's Hospital, a pediatric opthalmology center. The Outreach program of this effort, a "clinic without walls", is a program of free vision screening of young children in their own neighborhoods, with evaluation of the screening and follow-up provided by professionals at TLEC. Trained Lions Club members screen children from 12 months to 72 months to detect disorders that could result in serious eye problems or blindness at an age when treatment is most effective. This innovative program has been a model for similar programs across the country and around the world.