Kat Corbett’s Current and Planned Gifts Help Orbis’s Mission to Treat Children

Kat Corbett has always cared deeply about helping children meet their potential. A primary-grade teacher, she founded her own school in Toronto and later moved it to Florida after a vacation there. “We realized we were living on the wrong end of the continent, weather-wise,” she jokes. “No more snowsuits!”

Kat supports Orbis’s work with a monthly donation; she wishes it could be more but is living on a fixed income, so she’s included Orbis in her will. “All children deserve the chance to grow up healthy and happy,” she says, “and we can contribute to that—as we’re able now and with more later.”

For decades, Kat has volunteered with children—mentoring second graders, providing literacy activities in preschools, offering ballet classes in inner-city centers and homeless shelters, and teaching violin and languages in her own home. She has also written for children, including a series of novels about a young dancer.

Kat is excited that Orbis’s work, training eye-health teams in low-income countries, is now benefiting nearly three million children every year. “Too many children are growing up blind,” she says, “when their vision could so easily be restored. It’s such a waste of their potential!”

Her concern for literacy kicks in too. “Without sight,” she says, “children can’t learn to read because there aren’t schools for the blind in low-income countries. Remaining illiterate, they won’t get decent work and will be stuck with the lowest quality of life. Blindness is a terrible handicap.”

You, too, can help children reach their potential by naming Orbis in your estate plan. “Be a turning point in their lives,” Kat says. “Anything you do for children affects their lives forever.”