Mentoring
Eye to Eye is a national, award-winning mentoring program for students with learning and attention issues.
We train high school and college students with learning differences, including dyslexia and ADHD, to mentor similarly-identified middle school students. We are an easy-to-implement social-emotional intervention with high-impact results.
How It Works
The Setting
Our Curriculum
Training Our Leaders
The People
Once a week, Mentors and Mentees meet in a welcoming after-school group.
For some students, maybe for the first time, they learn what community is like without judgment, without stigma. Mentees meet a brighter version of their future: it’s there in the room. Students can talk about things that might be uncomfortable in front of a teacher or parent. Over the course of the year, through the arc of our proven social-emotional curriculum, self-doubt transforms into empowerment.
Social-emotional skills are vital to students with learning and attention issues, and are at the core of our curriculum.
Our Mentees develop metacognition skills, build self-esteem, identify strengths and challenges, find their allies, and learn to self-advocate. Our proven curriculum utilizes art, where there are no right or wrong answers, as a tool of self-expression. Every project and activity in our unified 18-week curriculum centers on a specific social-emotional learning objective. Every lesson builds on the previous, moving students from self-doubt to empowerment.
Mentored by experience. Trained by Eye to Eye.
With empathy and purpose, our Mentors and Mentees grow together, shaping skills that help students transition to the next stages of education, work, and life. Eye to Eye carefully selects, screens, and trains Chapter Leaders and Mentors for each school site. Chapter Leaders receive a full week of training each summer at the Young Leaders Organizing Institute at Brown University, and Eye to Eye staff train Mentors year-round across the country.
Who’s involved at each school site?
We have an established setup and training process supported by our National Program Coordinators (NPC). One of our NPCs oversees each school site, and stays in close contact with Chapter Leaders, Chapter Advisors, and Mentee School Sponsors.
At Eye to Eye, we have a mantra of “more students, more schools”. Today, we are excited to share with you a plan that will enable us to reach hundreds of thousands of identified middle schoolers while continuing to grow our national movement of young leaders. Together this will create a more equitable school system.
David Flink
Founder and Chief Empowerment Officer
There is no greater feeling than coming to work every day knowing that each and every person around you cares deeply about the mission we serve; to help the 1 in 5 who learn differently reach their full potential.
Juliana Albano
“I believe that sharing my story, and inviting others to share their stories, is one of the most powerful things I can do. I want to encourage kids with learning disabilities to be proud and dream big. To think that I am able to change lives is really such a dream come true.”
Jewell Loyd
Eye to Eye Honorary Diplomat
Where we are
We are in cities all over the country. Browse our chapters and find one local to you.