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   SUMMER 2009 NEWSLETTER
Spotlight: Camp Vision Project Eye-To-Eye's summer program, Camp Vision celebrated its third anniversary this year by expanding to a second site. In addition to the session that was held at Keene State College August 17th-21st, Camp Vision was hosted at Hobart and William Smith College from July 6th-10th. Thirteen campers attended the Hobart William Smith session and twelve participated at Keene State. Thirteen students received scholarships to attend camp from local businesses and supportive community members. Shena Vagliano, one of the Camp Vision counselors, explains that the benefits of Camp Vision are similar to those of Project Eye-To-Eye: "we are focusing on empowering a group of individuals who don't get empowered every day. Camp is focused on self-esteem, which is the driving force of success. The self-confidence that the kids get from camp really affects how they deal with situations outside of camp and during school." For more information: http://www.campvisionsummer.com/index.php
The New Look (and Sound) of the Project Eye-To-Eye Website "The internet is increasingly becoming the best avenue to organize communities, provide messages of hope, and disseminate information,"explains David Flink, Executive Director of Project Eye-To-Eye, "we have completely reorganized our website, making the entire site universally designed and user-centered." The new website includes various 'LD friendly' features, including text-size enhancement capabilities and text-to-speak software on every page. Additionally, each user's experience will be tailored to the individual using the site. Site visitors have the opportunity to identify themselves as parents, students, mentors, volunteers, educators, donors, or foundations and corporate sponsors. Each page contains a video of a Project Eye-To-Eye participant who is most similar to the visitor. A mentor visiting the site would be greeted by a video from a fellow mentor. A parent would be greeted by a video from a parent, etc. Nicole Crescenzi, the web designer of the new the site, focused on increasing the website's usability and improving the visitor's experience. "My goal was to make it easy for a visitor to connect and find the proper information in just one click," Crescenzi explains, "I wanted to add a bunch of images and videos so that an LD student can immediately see that he/she is not alone." Additionally, the new website has a web-statistics function which provides the Eye-To-Eye staff with how many people visit the website each day, week, or month and which pages are visited most frequently. Crescenzi reveals that the main benefit of having a website for Project Eye-To-Eye is that, "a lot of people have moved towards using the web. It is easier for people to find Eye-To-Eye if they don't already know about it. Having a website is the best way to reach out to a broader community." David Flink shares that, "The motivation behind the enhanced web presence is two-fold: to provide a message of hope and knowledge that is specific and relevant to each user, and to make a clear statement about the importance of universal design and the principles of inclusion and access, and set precedence for not just websites but information dissemination as a whole."
August Events: Board Retreat and Organizing Institute Project Eye-To-Eye hosted its first Executive Board retreat on August 8th and 9th, the same weekend as the 5th annual Organizing Institute. Executive Director, David Flink, explains that, "the Board Retreat is an opportunity for us to pause and look at the innovation from the grass roots constituencies of the program and see how to better support them and our mission. Eye-To-Eye is becoming something bigger than a mentoring program; we want to prepare for that." Both the Board Retreat and the Organizing Institute were hosted at Brown University. The Organizing Institute was held from the 6th to the 9th of August, during which all Project Eye-To-Eye chapter coordinators convened to prepare for the upcoming year, explore various LD issues, and strengthen the LD and Eye-To-Eye community.
2009/2010 Artist-in-Residence: Eric McGehearty Project Eye-To-Eye's new Artist in Residence, Eric McGehearty, graduated Magna-Cum-Laude from the University of the Ozarks in 2001 and completed his Masters of Fine Arts at the University of North Texas in 2004. His art has been shown nationally at numerous venues, including the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, DC and the Armory Show in New York. His United We Stand project was nationally recognized at the Americans for the Arts 2007 Public Art Year in Review as one of the 40 best public art projects of the year. In addition to being an accomplished artist, Eric McGehearty is extremely dyslexic. "I have never read a book," he proudly states, "but I have listened to thousands of them." McGehearty explains that, "books are how we pass information from one generation to the next; to not have access to that changes your life perspective." McGehearty's art explores "the worlds of illegibility and inaccessibility." He reveals that, "by combining the logic embedded in language with the irrationality of thinking without words, my work engages questions about how we understand the world." Like many LD students, McGehearty found school to be nearly impossible as a young child. His experience began to change when he took an art class in the third grade. "I was actually good at it," McGehearty reflects, "it brought me out and I started to try in other areas of school." He found that he could excel with the proper help, such as books on tape, and that it wasn;t his comprehension that was the problem, but the technicalities of the class format. McGehearty attributes much of his current success to his ability to creatively problem solve. "Because of my dyslexia, I have to find ways to get around everyday struggles that others don’t encounter," McGehearty explains, "I know that I can almost always find a solution to any problem." He believes that art is an integral tool in developing this important skill: "art is about learning how to be creative and express a thought or vision in a way that other people can understand. Learning how to independently come up with answers is an incredibly important skill for LD students." Although McGehearty is still developing the projects for the Beyond Normal Art Club, he is clear that each project will "provide an opportunity for the students to learn about themselves." McGehearty is intent on creating projects that are focused on self-expression instead of the final art piece. "I want the projects to help the students develop confidence in talking about LDs," he explains, "it is a important life skill to be able to talk about who you are.
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