In 1990, a United Methodist Volunteers in Mission team traveled to the rural mountains of Jamaica to help communities still recovering from Hurricane Gilbert. While some volunteers repaired damaged homes, schools, and churches, a medical team provided basic health services, including eye exams and eyeglasses. Two optometrists from Memphis had donated 1,000 pairs of glasses after months of careful collection and labeling. However, the team soon discovered a major problem: fewer than 200 people could use the glasses provided, and the prescriptions for the remaining pairs did not match the needs of hundreds of people still waiting for help.

After returning home, volunteers worked to understand what went wrong. Through conversations with the Lions Club and faculty at the Southern College of Optometry, they learned that eyeglass donations must be carefully screened and matched to the specific vision needs common in the regions being served. At the time, this process required significant time, training, and professional expertise—resources that many medical teams and clinics simply did not have. As a result, large numbers of donated glasses went unused, and many people continued to live with correctable vision problems.

To solve this challenge, Project 20/20 was created in 1992 as a regional eyeglass donation and processing center. Organized by the Memphis Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, the program was supported by more than 500 churches across west Tennessee and west Kentucky. Trained volunteers—most of them not optometrists—collected, sorted, and screened donated eyeglasses. In 1993, Project 20/20 made its first shipment of glasses to medical teams serving in Costa Rica and Belize. With support from the Southern College of Optometry, along with custom-designed equipment and software, the screening process became accurate, efficient, and accessible to volunteers of all ages. Since then, tens of thousands of carefully screened eyeglasses have been distributed to medical mission teams around the world, helping people see clearly and improve their quality of life.