This Eye Donation Awareness Program is an Ongoing project of our club for the last 12 years. This is one of our signature projects.Its a unique method to bring awareness by recognizing the noble gesture of an eye/organ donor (who has passed away) by felicitating one family member in the presence of 500 people in a function at Balgandharva. Research says that every 10 minutes someone is added to the waiting list to receive an organ donation – a number that is continuously rising by the time you read this article. Willingness is the 1st step in becoming an organ donor and once a person is motivated enough to give life to someone then there is no looking back. Sunday 30th August saw a steady stream of eye and organ donors’ family walking into Balgandharava Rangmandir. . They had come to witness a sense of pride and joy since someone from their family had donated their eyes or other organs. They had come to collect their citations that we handed over to them with due respect. It was a beautiful function organized by the Rotary Club of Poona Downtown in association with Zonal Transplant Co-ordination Centre, Jagriti Mandal and District Blind Control Society. The function was to recognize and felicitate eye and other organ donors. The function started at 9:15 am and the Chief Guest was Mr Rajkumarji Chordia. Citations were given to 150 eye donors’ families and 7 organ donors’ families. About 25 families contacted the registration counter on Sunday morning itself and they will be given citations within 2 weeks after verifying their data. Just to give you a glimpse of how the donors data is collected. It’s a very systematic procedure of collecting and verifying the data collected. Step I – A couple of eye banks are approached for data of people who donated eyes. Step II – A detail list is prepared by the committee of all data collected. Step III - Records are verified and processed. Step IV – All the donor families are contacted by sending letter through the postal department. Step V – Once the letters have reached the donors, they send back the reply envelope with the name of the donor which is verified by the committee. Step VI – After all the reply letters are received, then the process of the preparing the citation begins. On the citation the name of the donor, along with the photograph and date is mentioned. Just for the records, this year the data of all the donors were collected from the following eye banks: H.V Desai Eye Bank Dinanath Mangeshkar Hospital Aditya Birla Hospital Ruby Hall Clinic Jankalyan Sasson Eye Bank AFMC Eye Bank 831 families were mailed letters by post. But most of the donor’s family’s addresses were incomplete and hence letters did not reach them. Overall the function was attended by a lot of dignitaries from the city of Pune, lot of donors families had come from out of station, a couple of people spoke on the importance of eye and organ donation. A film – Dhristhi was played for the audience, which highlighted the importance of eye donation. Also a few of the donor’s family members gave short 2 min speeches expressing their feelings and emotional attachment to the whole process and they felt that they were keeping their family members alive by donating their eyes and organs. A good number of Rotarians and Anns were present for the program. Everyone was given his or her duty and the entire work was done very smoothly. The program started and ended on schedule time, there was no confusion or waste of time during distribution of such a large number of citations. RCPD has proved that they can handle such big functions wonderfully with the cooperation of the members