Taking place between 7 and 27 June, the 6th edition of the Race for Vision virtually united 5350 L’OCCITANE Group employees worldwide! Together, they covered more than 735,000 km (walking, running, cycling and swimming). On the strength of this magnificent collective resultL’OCCITANE, via its Foundation, will donate €300,000 in support of projects to fight avoidable blindness.
‘I am very proud of our teams and their amazing enthusiasm. Bravo and thank you all! This year, the Foundation will be focusing in particular on Burkina Faso, a country where we are heavily involved,’ says Reinold Geiger, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the L’OCCITANE Group and President of the L’OCCITANE Foundation. In fact, for over 30 years, L’OCCITANE has sourced hundreds of tons of organic, fair-trade shea butter from cooperatives in Burkina Faso. Estimates suggest that more than 2% of Burkina Faso’s inhabitants are blind, which is considerably higher than the global prevalence of 1%. Yet, 90% of those cases could have been prevented or cured.*Furthermore, in rural areas, which are home to 75% of the population of Burkina Faso, there is less than one ophthalmologist for every 2 million people.
Every year since 2016, the Race for Vision has been getting L’OCCITANE teams across the world moving. Its aim is to support the fight against blindness in countries where many cases of vision loss could be prevented with appropriate screening or treatment. The idea is to accumulate as many collective kilometres as possible by walking, running, cycling or swimming. At the end of the event, the Group pledges to support projects to fight blindness via the L’OCCITANE Foundation;its donation will be determined on the basis ofthe total distance covered.
According to the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB), 1.1 billion people across the world are blind or visually impaired, and yet 90% of those cases could have been prevented or cured.*
In the area of philanthropy, fighting avoidable blindness is one of L’OCCITANE’s, its subsidiaries’ and its Foundation’s major priorities for action. L’OCCITANEhas committed to helping 15 million people by 2025 through its Caring for Sight programme, which will fund medical equipment and training in addition to providing screening, glasses and treatment.
In Burkina Faso, the Foundation continues to work closely with NGOs such as Light for the World and Sightsavers in the fight against avoidable blindness.It helps with the training of ophthalmologists and medical staff, develops access to quality care in rural areas and contributes to the eradication of onchocerciasis (river blindness) and trachoma in the Cascades region.
More recently, the Foundation has extended its actions to help children by signing two agreements with the Association Soeur Emmanuelle and the NGO Helen Keller International. The lofty new aim of these two-year partnerships is to prevent cases of blindness among children through awareness raising among parents and teachers and eye screening and treatment where necessary.
*https://www.iapb.org/fr/learn/vision-atlas/
8 July 2021
The L’OCCITANE Foundation celebrates its 15th anniversary
The L’OCCITANE Foundation was created in 2006 by L’OCCITANE to bring together the different philanthropic initiatives in whichL’OCCITANE en Provence has been involved since its beginnings. It has a dedicated team and process to ensure the selected projects are impactful and sustained in the field through our NGO partners. The Foundation supports around 50projects per year in three areas of action:
_Caring for sight
_Empowering women
_Protecting biodiversity
The projects are carried out in partnership with NGOs such as UNICEF. Funded by L’OCCITANE, the Foundation has an average annual budget of €1,000,000. It is supported by profits* from the sale of charity products as well as L’OCCITANE’s subsidiaries around the world, which support local projects.
*In-store retail price, excluding taxes and the costs of transportation and production