They’ve Set Their Sights on Aiding the Poor in a Special Way : Charity: The Redondo Beach Lions Club and a Boy Scout troop collect old or unused prescription eyeglasses for distribution to needy people overseas.

A Redondo Beach service club and a Boy Scout troop are focusing attention on a truly visionary program that helps needy people around the world see more clearly.

The Redondo Beach Lions Club and Boy Scout Troop 595 are collecting prescription eyeglasses this month for eventual distribution to countries where eye wear is hard to come by. The glasses will be picked up from 28 collection bins at schools, doctors’ offices, fire stations and businesses throughout Redondo Beach.

They will be routed to the University of California College of Optometry at Berkeley, where optometry students will repair, polish and resurface them before sending them to other countries.

“Most glasses sit in the corner and you forget them,” said Charles Durham, vice president of the Redondo Beach Lions Club. “You think, ‘What’s one pair of glasses?’ But it makes another person see--we have to remember that.”

The Lions Club’s South Bay district, which includes nearly 50 clubs from San Pedro to Malibu, has been recycling eyeglasses since 1978. The program was launched locally by Inglewood optometrist Chris T. Tasulis Jr. while he chaired the district’s sight conservation committee.

In its first year, the glasses were sorted and then sent to Houston-based Amigos International, a group of health professionals including dentists, immunologists and opticians that does volunteer work in South and Central America.

Since then, Lions International has adopted the program on a national scale. Glasses collected nationwide are sent to the group’s Sight First headquarters in Sonoma, where they are routed around the world to nations in Africa, the former Soviet Union and South and Central America.

The program is designed to do more than simply help people see better, Tasulis said.

“Our presence in South and Central America in a peace effort like this is always good for American politics,” he said. “Sending money down there to power regimes like we did in El Salvador creates a lot of resentment. This counters that to a large degree.”

Although the Redondo Beach chapter has participated in the program since the recycling program’s early days, the chapter has not made an all-out effort to collect glasses until this year, Durham said.

Last year, the chapter picked up about 100 pairs of eyeglasses for the program, Durham said. But this year the chapter has set a more ambitious goal. Members hope to recycle more than 1,000 eyeglasses by the end of the month.

To meet its goal, the group enlisted the help of 13-year-old Darryl Fox, a Redondo Beach eighth-grader and Boy Scout, who was planning his own eyeglass collection project to earn merits needed to qualify him as an Eagle Scout.

“I was doing it for my Eagle project,” Fox said. “But when I found out what the Lions were doing and that they wanted to cure blindness, I thought that was a good cause” to be involved in.

Fox designed the campaign logo “Recycle Sight” on his computer and asked members of his Boy Scout troop to help paste the signs on plastic containers used as collection bins.

Visual impairment “is one of the leading health problems in the world,” Durham said. “We want to refocus people’s attention on the needs of people who have sight problems.”