FEATURE
STUDENTS PAY IT FORWARD WITH
DAVISION Since 2008, Shelby M.C. Davis ’54 GP’06 ’07 ’15 ’18 and the Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation have sent more than 40
international students to Lawrenceville in a unique extension of the Davis United World College Scholars Program. The Davis Scholars have significantly advanced Lawrenceville’s globalization and financial aid initiatives, and by sponsoring qualified students from across the globe, the Davis family has enabled the School to recruit from nations that are typically underrepresented at American boarding schools. One of these scholarship recipients, Ondrej Zindr ’16, has found a way to further extend the Davis family’s philanthropy with Davision, a nonprofit organization devoted to providing free eye care and prescription eyeglasses to the economically disadvantaged. Government-sponsored healthcare plans are not required to include adult vision care among the services they provide, creating a need in the U.S. for other sources of funding. Ondrej seeks to fill that need through Davision by combining his “pay it forward” philosophy with an entrepreneurial spirit. Beginning with 750 pairs of Lawrenceville-branded sunglasses, Ondrej and the other Davis Scholars on campus managed to raise over $1,000 in their first successful fundraising campaign. In keeping with its “think globally, act locally” approach, Davision reached out to community health centers and optometrists in the greater Trenton, New Jersey, area to make its own vision a reality. Within months of that first effort, Davision had raised nearly $10,000. Along the way, Lawrenceville’s Davis Scholars have received some pretty high-end advice. Shelby M.C. Davis, founder of the investment firm Davis Advisors and a noted global philanthropist, is helping to promote Davision among Davis scholars at other schools and colleges. In addition, Ondrej met with Sherry Snyder ’54 for entrepreneurial guidance when Snyder was on campus in January 2016 to receive the Aldo Leopold Award. Snyder is the founder of 14 companies, mostly in the biotechnology field, including Genzyme, which last year had a market capitalization of more than $23 billion. For now, Ondrej hopes the Davis Scholars will spread the program nationwide as they leave Lawrenceville – and the other northeast boarding schools hosting Davis scholarship recipients – to attend the participating United World Colleges. Ultimately, however, he would like to see Davision go global. As he wrote on his blog, “Thanks to the amazing opportunities provided to me, I can strive to help the world, with the help of Lawrentians, current, former and future.”