Rob Ring and What went wrong at Autism Speaks: Everything

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by Katie Wright for Age of Autism

I never thought I would be posting an article from an anti vax publication by the daughter of the founders of Autism Speaks. There is more detail of where the money actually goes for at A$ in this one article then I have seen from the mainstream media and neurodiversity movement media combined. The ND movement could not view autism more differently then the author and the publication she wrote for but Wright partially confirmed what the ND movement has been saying for years. Autism politics makes for strange bedfellows.

So basically regardless of your views on autism, A$ is not helping. Actually really nice to get the other perspective on this, even though I completely disagree with her.

I always just figured AS was created for the salaries; that seems to be a popular thing for highly sociable people to do in this century. Create a non-profit based on charisma, suck up all possible funding via charisma, hold fundraisers using charisma, distort the public view via - you guessed it - charisma. the goal is never actually make enough progress to have to do anything other than fund raise and put out press releases. Pay yourself and a few friends a nice salary until you retire.

There are so many of that type of non-profit / not-for-profit organizations around now that there really isn't much room left for the ones that want to actually enact so much change they no longer need to exist.

While she certainly doesn't support a pro-autism point of view here, there's something interesting about how Bob and Suzanne Wright's daughter thinks they're suboptimally allocating their funds.

In 2007 there was a very public fued between her and her parents because she thought as she said at the end of the article I posted above they were not paying enough attention to environmental causes.