Start-up program

Post Reply New Topic

Hello Everyone!
We are two people, a teacher who is autistic and a social worker who has autistic brothers, who wish to start a program for autistic adults. Our goal is to teach essential professional skills that most other organizations do not offer but could benefit the population at large. We operate on the belief that with the right support system in place, autistic people can meaningfully contribute to society, despite the challenges they face. Please select your top choices . Comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thank you!

I don't understand how "sex education" "parental support group" or even "personal development through therapy" fit into your stated goals. (I say "goals" because it's easier to talk about it if I split it into its 3 distinct parts: (1) That the program be "beneficial to the population [of autistic adults?] at large"; (2) That the program teach "essential professional skills"; (3) That the "essential professional skills" taught in the program are not taught by most other organizations".)

None of those three things seem like they have anything to do with "professional skills", per se....

I'm not sure what "personal development through therapy" might refer to and am completely baffled as to what "parental support group" refers to. It seems like maybe you've combined a question about what skills/subjects you should teach with some other question(s), and "parental support group" and "personal development through therapy" are answers to the other question(s).....it's very confusing for me.

The only options I could see being universally relevent to most autistic people in the context of developing "essential professional skills" are "career development" and "social skills" but only if you focus on social skills for the workplace.

Teaching stuff like entrepreneurship/leadership/public speaking is great, but only for a specific subset of the autistic population interested in certain types of careers/employment options/volunteer work/activism.

Thank you for your feedback! Let me clear up why we included the three things you mentioned.

The parental support group is, of course, for the parents. It would be a way for the parents of the students in our program to get together and build a sense of community amongst one another. Building a sense of community among everyone is important to development and having parents involved in the program would be enormously helpful. We were also conceptualizing the support group as a class that teaches parents how to take on the challenges that come with raising autistic people. It is important to mention that we're deciding on whether to make this program for adolescents or adults and if we end up working with adults, it will be unnecessary, perhaps too late, to have a parent support group.

Sex education, I think, is extremely vital in personal development. A huge problem that a lot of autistic people face (btw, this is the autistic teacher writing this. My partner and I are sharing this account) is a persistent feeling of loneliness and disconnectedness and in the rare event that an autistic person finds themselves in a sex ed class, they will most likely become lost and even more confused because the class does not address their needs. That was certainly my experience. As the teacher, I will work on a curriculum that addresses that intersection between sexuality and disability. And believe it or not, it does relate to professional skills! If one is not well informed on sexual etiquette, one will be at risk of being on the receiving end of sexual harassment lawsuits, which could make it hard to find work! In addition, sexual frustration can take a toll on your confidence, which then translates into not doing as well in the workplace, let alone life.

The 'personal development through therapy' thing is something that we are still tweaking at the moment so even we don't know what it looks like! We do want our practice to be more socially-conscious, something that is missing in the way that therapy is normally done. We want our therapy to be mindful of the insidiousness of ableism and to help the population come to terms with the fact that they live in a world that doesn't understand them while empowering them to be their true selves.

We understand that not all autistic people have the same needs but we do want to give everyone who comes into our program a shot at developing the skills they need to meaningfully contribute to society. We want everyone in our program to have a shot at pursuing their dreams and to go beyond the usual 'professional skills' that may become outdated within our lifetimes. Our job is essentially to level the playing field for autistic people and to unravel the oppression that they have spent their lives enduring. To us, personal development and professional development are inseparable.

Yes, it's all very ambitious! We're in the stage in which we see what's doable and what isn't and that's why we're reaching out to people. Again, thank you for your valuable input and we will keep it in mind going forward!

You're welcome. Thank you for the clarifications.



I wondered about whether it was for the autistic people's parents (my other theory was that it might be for autistic adults who are parents, and the only way I could think to tie it into "professional skills" is if it was something about work/life balance or maybe about autistic people becoming childcare workers....although the latter seemed very unlikely....that was when I was reading it a "parent support" -- when I saw it was "parental support" my brain just kind of shut down).

I don't think it would be any more unecessary to have a support group for involved parents of autistic adults than it would be for parents of autistic adolescents, if you're placing a high value on family/community support and participation..... it depends on how broad a population you want to serve. (I think it would be awesome if your program were inclusive of autistic adults who require a lot of support from their parents or other caregivers.)



I would agree with you on this, I just don't see how it relates to your stated goal.

If you want to develop a program that works on personal skills as well as professional ones, then I think that should be explicitly stated as part of your goal. People may not know otherwise, even if they agree with you that personal and professional are connected.



Very true about sexual ettiquette in the workplace, I would definitely support teaching that as part of social skills for the workplace. (And I support general sex ed as part of personal education for autistic people more generally....but I would be thrown off by general sex ed suddenly appearing in a program where I expected to be learning about professional skills.)

I do know that in reality personal and professional are connected, that one sphere of life impacts others, but when you're planning/presenting/advertising a program to people I think you should explicitly state that you intend to also focus on personal development as well rather than just stating you intend to focus on professional development.

I find it misleading and confusing when people do otherwise....I'd be very unhappy if I signed up for a program to help me develop professional skills and then discovered that some huge portion of the content I was expected to sit through/participate was about personal development stuff that wasn't of interest to me/wasn't relevent to what I needed and thought I had signed up for.....

So if you're going for wraparound-type services (not sure I'm using "wraparound" right but can't think of anything else) and intending to be empowering, I strongly suggest that you also use a client-centered approach and don't make all parts of your program necessary for everyone. When I have been subjected to education/support services as all-encompassing as what you're envisioning but presented to me as being for something very specific and where I couldn't pick and choose what I actually needed and it was presented as if every single bit of the program was absolutely essential and necessary for everyone, I have found it extremely offensive (like who are you -- not you, personally, but whoever -- to tell me what I do and don't need when you don't even know me and have literally no knowledge of my prior experience/skills/knowledge? who are you to tell me what parts of my personal life must need work and how I must work on them when you know literally nothing about my personal life? ) and/or burdensome (could be doing something else with my time, would get very bored and impatient and frustrated) and when I could I just walked away.

Not every autistic person is like me, of course....but do think it's better to try to individualize a person's programming if you're doing something so multi-faceted, and I believe nothing is more empowering than offering collaborative, client-centered supports and education where people are allowed to choose for themselves what services/education they want to receive.