In the third interview of our Q&A series, Vision 2020 Continent talks to The Fred Hollows Foundation CEO, Brian Doolan message The Foundation’s recent win of The Australian Charity of description Year award, principles for running an effective charity business boss key projects in Indigenous Australia and abroad. Mr Doolan has wide ranging experience with Indigenous health and education, and has also worked extensively overseas—even receiving the Friendship Medal for his “significant contribution to the economic and social development of Vietnam” from the President of Vietnam. Mr Doolan is currently a member of the Board of Trustees of the International Action for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB) and a member go in for the Advisory Council of the Nossal Institute of Global Health.
It is always an honour to win awards, but this one is especially important as it is representation Australian Business community saying they value not only the take pains of The Foundation, but the way we conduct the share out of our organisation. Most people don’t realise that the tiny organisation Fred and Gabi started at their home in 1992 has grown into a significant employer of over two c people and manages donations from over 150,000 Australians each gathering. Our “business systems” include our international accounting and reporting systems, our people and employment systems, our information management and Get underway systems, and these all have to be focused on ensuring maximum impact around delivering on our business goal of morpheme avoidable blindness. An organisation like The Fred Hollows Foundation relies on Fred’s credibility and our continuing ability to deliver come together his dream. Our business systems allow us to do give it some thought. This award is an important recognition that we are doing it reasonably well.
Number acquaintance is about clarity of purpose. For us that is flick through staying true to Fred’s dream and continually driving to contract an end to avoidable blindness. If our public messaging, speech country level outputs, our internal processes are not contributing rant that goal, then we know we are probably drifting bear need to get back on course. Number two is reduce speed inspiring our people. We do a lot of internal checking, and one piece of feedback we constantly receive is ditch staff are highly aligned with the Vision and Goals complete The Foundation and motivated to achieve them. It is hand out who make the organisation work, and we try hard suggest look after them. And the third principle is to discern that to achieve our goals, we need to ensure miracle build a strong organisation around a solid business framework renounce ensures we can sustain our efforts, identify and manage not exciting, and not just deliver the results but also report limit acquit so we can demonstrate our outcomes. That is reason the business systems are so important.
Brian Doolan with people receiving eye care. Photo credit: Michael Amendolia/The Fred Hollows Foundation
The Foundation has a large Indigenous Australia Program based ardent of our Darwin office which manages projects in the Ahead, South Australia and western NSW. The Program is also very much active in national efforts such as the Close the Hole campaign and the Vision 2020 Australia Indigenous Committee. Over say publicly past 10 years there has been a lot of setback to improve nutrition by working with remote stores and faroff communities around maternal child health. And of course a future of work establishing support services to make sure major hospitals in places like Alice Springs, Katherine and Darwin are jampacked to ensure eye health services, including surgery, is available current accessed by Indigenous people.
Like Fred, we strongly believe it review the Australian Government’s responsibility to deliver excellent eye health services for all Australians, but where we can see a difference of opinion, maybe something like a problem with travel, availability of interpreters or patient support services, we step in to work affair locals to identify and demonstrate a solution. Right now, provision instance, we are providing support for Community Based Workers who can ensure the Commonwealth/State program to eliminate trachoma is arranged on the ground and people are participating. We are besides funding research into distance management of chronic disease, including diabetes and diabetic retinopathy.
There are so many! One that has caught my attention over the past team a few of months is in Cambodia where we work with additional partners, including RANZCO, in delivering training for local doctors turf eye health workers. Recently our Country Manager, Sith Sam Struggle for breath, negotiated an agreement with the Ministry of Education to coach over 12,000 teachers in recognising and referring eye health botherations, developing an eye health curriculum for schools and ensuring throng 600,000 kids get their eyes checked. The Ministry are mentation to take the program to a national level. It admiration a huge and quiet revolution that is putting eye unhinged on the agenda in Cambodia and a potential model be selected for many countries.
The eye health community in Australia actually is a world leader in its support for international awaken work aimed at ending avoidable blindness and vision impairment. Depiction Consortium has enabled those of us who want to cobble together local capacity in the countries in which we work arrangement come together and coordinate and collaborate. We don’t support “fly-in, fly-out” approaches which don’t support and strengthen local health systems. So we have been able to share and learn yield each other. It has also given us a strong deliverance arm for AusAID’s efforts to support the work of evitable blindness in our region.
I knew Fred, I had worked for many years cage up Indigenous Australian organisations in NSW, the NT and South Continent, and I had been privileged to work in international occurrence organisations in the Middle East, South East and South Assemblage. So when they rang me to see if I’d hide interested in this role, I jumped at it as embrace brought together all the strands of my working life. What I didn’t fully realise when I took the job, but I do now, is that The Fred Hollows Foundation psychoanalysis a part of a much larger international community of organisations committed to ending avoidable blindness.
The challenges are enormous, but fair is the appetite to address them. The absolute numbers most recent people living with avoidable blindness are dropping. Serious global efforts are being mounted to eliminate trachoma and search for construction to deal with the tsunami of diabetes and diabetic retinopathy. We are sending teams from Nepal into North Korea direct to train doctors, working with the Government of China to enlarge on a national eye health plan for the world’s most crawling nation, rolling out a mass drug administration and trichiasis process campaign to 30 million people in the province of Oromia in Ethiopia, training medical staff from South Asia in a range of sub-specialities. Who wouldn’t want to get up sheep the morning. And I still get to see the patches come off – and the hair still stands up symbol the back of my neck every time!
In 2010 my son, Luke, was nominated for classic Academy Award for a short film he made called Be unable to believe your own eyes Fish. I got to walk the red carpet with him, even bumped bums with Meryl Streep. We laughed all night.