David Flink
Executive Director and Co-Founder, Project Eye-to-EyeMovement: Rights for Learning Disabled
Diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD at a young age,
David Flink is a member of the first generation of people with learning disabilities to be provided with intervention and accommodations. There are 45 million US residents with learning disabilities, yet David felt like a failure: “I had a feeling of hopelessness and of being left out of education as a whole.” Although his parents and teachers frequently told him he would be able to go to college, David would have found that message more believable if it had come from a person with a learning disability (LD) who had finished college. With that in mind, David co-founded
Project Eye-to-Eye in 1997, while he was a student at Brown University. Pairing students with LD of college and high school age with those in elementary, middle, and high school, Project Eye-to-Eye is the nation’s only mentoring program for people with LD. Project Eye-to-Eye has grown to include 26 chapters in 14 states, and in the last year the organization has given more than 250 public presentations to over 15,000 educators, parents, and students.
Ultimately, David wants to change both the public’s perception of learning disabilities and the law’s response to them: “Our goal is equal access to school and employment.” To accomplish this goal, David plans to develop Project Eye-to-Eye support centers across the country for those newly diagnosed with learning disabilities. He also wants to change education admissions testing requirements, educate people about existing laws on workplace accommodations, and encourage the enforcement of these laws. In addition to his ongoing work as executive director of Project Eye-to-Eye, from 2002 to 2004 David was an admissions officer at Brown University, serving as disabilities liaison for all Brown applicants with disabilities. He has spoken at colleges and universities across the country and in April 2009 he spoke at the Education Revolution Conference held in San Francisco’s AT&T Park. That conference is recognized as the largest gathering of people with learning disabilities. David holds a master’s degree in disability studies in education from Columbia University and bachelor’s degrees in education and psychology from Brown University.
