The Louisiana Lions Eye Bank is hosting their inaugural Eye Ball on Oct. 19 at the Bossier Hilton Garden Inn Ballroom.

The Halloween-themed costume party will last from 7 p.m. until midnight and feature live music, food, a cash bar, carnival games, raffles to win prizes and more.

An event to raise money and awareness, the bank hopes to use this event to educate others on their mission to restoring sight to the visually impaired.

“[The Eye Ball] will be a fun night full of contests, games, prizes, drinking, eating and music,” Tony Simpson, marketing and education coordinator for the eye bank, said. “Then, we get to make people aware of what we do, and that’s the greatest thing. When it comes down to it all, we just want people to know the reason they’re there.”

Simpson said they plan to make this an annual event, giving the bank more of a community presence.

“We’re one of the best-kept secrets in Shreveport,” Denise Odom, executive director for the eye bank, said. “A lot of the people we talk to don’t even know we exist. The concept of an eye bank can be a hard concept for people to understand, unless they have a family member, or even themselves, that have had to actually have a transplant done.”

Established in 1981, the Louisiana Lions Eye Bank is one of three eye banks in Louisiana, covering the largest area with 33 northern parishes, stretching from Texas to Mississippi. They are a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that match donors with surgeons who are seeking corneas for transplant for their patients. Because of time constraints with recovering from donors, the staff work on-call hours and can sometimes face special challenges.

“We have a lot of people who sign up to be donors, but they neglect to discuss it with their family members,” Odom said. “Then we have to approach [the next of kin] at really difficult times; they’re grieving the death of their loved one, and we have to tell them that their [family member] was on our registry as a cornea donor, and we’d like to come in and make their wishes happen. We typically get good reception most of the time, but there are times when they say they were never talked to about that, and they don’t [want to allow the procedure].”

Both Simpson and Odom agree that if nothing else, their main goal for the Eye Ball is to raise eye and donor awareness. They work with other eye banks so patients don’t have to be on a waiting list, which can sometimes be months or years, and said one thing they are most in need of is more donors.

“We have a huge population in our area, so you’d expect we’d have more donors,” Odom said. “But we don’t. A big reason is a lot of the time, families will decline the donation.”

Odom has worked in the ophthalmology community for more than 25 years and has seen the other side of the situation.

“When you watch someone seeing for the first time in years and be able to see things we take for granted, I can’t tell you how many times we all break down and cry. It has a huge emotional impact on you,” she said.

“[With] every person who is a donor that we recover on, two people get sight within the first five days of that recovery,” Odom said. “[That donation] changes two lives.”

More than 280 people in Louisiana have had their sight repaired because of the Louisiana Lions Eye Bank in the past year. The organization requires the hard work of a dedicated staff and up-to-date and elaborate medical equipment to function on a daily basis, and rely largely on donations and fundraisers.

The Eye Ball is an opportunity for guests to party with a purpose, raising money and awareness for an organization committed to giving the gift of sight. Simpson and Odom hope the fundraiser will also serve as an educational tool in shedding a new light on their mission.

“In the past, we’ve had to deal with the image of morbidity,” Simpson said. “We wanted to try and shine a new light on it in a different way, because what we do here has such a positive impact.”

Tickets can be purchased individually, by couple or by table online at www.theeyeball.info. For more information on the Eye Ball, the Louisiana Lions Eye Bank, ways to become a donor or how to make a contribution, visit their website at www.lalionsibnk.org.