Barbara Crow, Chief Executive Officer of VisionGift (VG), has announced her retirement; her final day will be December 31, 2016. Ms. Crow has served as Executive Director/CEO of VG, formerly Lions Eye Bank of Oregon, since 1998. She came to the organization from Oregon Health & Sciences University where she served as Executive Director of the Oregon Eye Bank at OHSU from 1987, and is credited, along with Dr. Joseph Robertson and Lion George DeHart, with merging the two eye banks in 2000.
Ms. Crow’s tenure saw the eye bank through its growth years as a program of the Oregon Lions Sight & Hearing Foundation, to its present day status as a world renown eye bank dedicated to its mission of honoring its donors and their gifts of sight in order to eradicate preventable blindness through transplantation, vital eye research, education and the provision of medical products used to treat specific conditions in the eye. As she puts it, “I came to a program that had 7 employees and a 24 member Board of dedicated Lions, many of whom stayed with the eye bank to provide guidance and support through the years. FDA regulations soon pushed the eye bank into a new world of increasing tasks to complete the same job. Today VG has a staff of 60 and provides over 1500 corneas a year for transplant in Oregon and across the world. We’ve added serum eye drops to ease dry eye conditions, a patented “halo®” group of sterile tissues used in glaucoma surgeries, and vital eye research projects in conjunction with local cornea surgeons and with researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD.”
