Mario Lapointe: Uniting the Community to Raise Hope

When Mario Lapointe’s daughter was diagnosed with a blinding eye disease, retinitis pigmentosa (RP), in 2012, the family was in complete shock, as no one in the family had RP before.

But the diagnosis didn’t stop his daughter Amélie — then just 19 years old — from pursuing her dream of becoming a lawyer. She completed her law degree in 2016, graduating summa cum laude — the highest honour. Since then, she has worked as a lawyer and also had two children of her own.

As a parent, the diagnosis also gave Mario a new-found purpose in raising funds for research into blinding eye diseases. He first learned about Fighting Blindness Canada (FBC) through Amélie’s optometrist and turning to FBC helped his family answer a lot of questions they had. They also decided they needed to support the organization to raise awareness and help others. In 2014, Mario began participating in FBC’s Cycle for Sight.

“Every edition of Cycle for Sight has been a great and joyful experience, except in 2016 when the weather was really bad (it was pouring rain) and I had to change a flat tire,” he says.

Mario and his family have also organized their own annual fundraising events, including a fundraising dinner in Gatineau with more than 120 guests from 2016 to 2019. Friends played music, and performed songs and comedy on stage.

Since 2021, Mario, Amélie and her partner Rémi have also been organizing an annual cornhole tournament in the south shore of Montreal, where close to 100 teams gather every year. Cornhole is a lawn game in which players take turns throwing fabric bean bags at an inclined board with a hole in it.

All in all, over the past 11 years, Marios’ fundraising team, the Vision d’espoir / Vision of Hope team, has raised more than $107,000 for Fighting Blindness Canada.

Most recently, Mario and his team participated in the first ever MOVE FOR SIGHT event, which took place in June. MOVE FOR SIGHT was an inclusive event in which participants could MOVE in whichever way suited them best, including walking, running, dancing, swimming, cycling and more.

“Our hope is to help give those who live with vision loss, access to treatments and cures by providing funding to Canada’s top researchers who are committed to stopping vision loss and restoring sight,” he says.