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Hiring People with Disabilities as Direct Support Staff – AHRC NYC Advance & Earn Provides Training and Support for NYC Youth With and Without Disabilities
“He has this desire to learn.” “I knew he was personable and had the temperament for the job.” These are the words of some AHRC New York City staff describing Alex DeCarlo, a Direct Support Professional (DSP) who brings a unique perspective to his colleagues and the people with...
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Honoring My Limitations as an Autistic Entrepreneur
I am an autistic entrepreneur. That is a sentence I couldn’t have uttered that long ago. As far as the entrepreneurship part goes, I’ve run a business that I founded in 2013 called Autism Personal Coach. With the help of so many others, my company has turned into a business that is stable and...
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How to Advocate for Your Nonspeaking or Minimally Verbal Child or Adult
Over the last decade, there has been an increase in autistic self-advocates coming into the public eye through their incredible means to advocate for themselves - and others like them. These individuals have become a powerful voice for boards, committees, research and quality improvement...
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Supporting Teens and Adults in Becoming the Best Self-Advocate They Can
The creation of self-advocacy is a story that is one of pioneering and revolution dating back as far as 1968 (Glumbić et al., 2022). Today, many self-advocacy organizations target elevating neurodiverse voices and providing space for neurodiverse individuals to advocate for themselves. The current...
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Autism Advocacy: Inclusion, Empowerment, and Human Rights
“Autism isn’t this strange alien thing, it’s just a different way of thinking and experiencing the world. Some of us will find ourselves more or less compatible with modern living than others, we will all have different needs…but autism is not terrifying or awful, nor is it marvellous and...
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This is What Autistiphobia Looks Like: Why Autistic Advocacy Matters
The Researcher A lot of people do not like Autistic people. Which is a common topic in Autistic spaces. But many allistics who want to advocate with us, as allies, stop talking to me when I mention attitudinal barriers to accessibility. Or else they find creative ways to avoid the...
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Advocating for the Advocate
Experiencing a life-changing event is one of the reasons people start advocating. For autistic people, advocating can mean stepping so far out of their comfort zone socially, it feels like they’ve lost sight of it. As for myself, I went from feeling invisible most of my childhood, to talking in...
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The Unique Responsibility of Neuroexpansive Minds for Cultural Inclusion
As an advocate for those with neuroexpansive minds in bodies that have become commodified bodies, I have come to understand, over the years, that a piecemeal approach to the valuing of difference and extensions of freedoms for all designated expendable in modern culture depends on every such...
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Advocacy on Behalf of Less-Impaired Autistics
In the more than two decades since my diagnosis, I have attended countless autism community events of just about every kind, not to mention numerous others in which issues concerning autism somehow came up. In virtually all of these, I routinely disclosed that I was on the autism spectrum and on...
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S:US’ Community Fridge Project: Cultivating Social Justice and Health Equity in Our Community
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for social justice to address racial discrimination, health inequity, food insecurity and homelessness became starkly apparent as time went on and the effects of the pandemic became more visible. These experiences were at the forefront of our minds...
