How we started
We started as a small group of parents who met when our local Children’s Disability Network Team in Baldoyle ran a 6 week pilot programme for teenagers focussing on Neurodiversity and some of the challenges that neurodiverse teenagers in particular face. It was an excellent programme and the kids really benefited from it.
In parallel, they ran a parents course teaching us how to support our children.
At the end of the programme, we were encouraged to keep in touch with each other, and so starting in May 2023, we met every month for a coffee and catch-up, and shared our stories and advice. It was really beneficial. What we had was something we hadn’t had before…the sense that we were not the only people in the area with autistic children, and we no longer needed to feel completely isolated, as we had until then.
We were the parents whose kids had always been ‘in trouble’ at school or pre-school, and consequently, we parents always felt in trouble too because we ‘couldn’t manage our children’. It was a pretty low place to exist. So having each other was really comforting and empowering.
Of course, we and our kids weren’t really the problem. The problem was that the community and society as a whole didn’t understand what Autism actually is, and we parents were only learning as we went along, blindly trying to navigate a mountain of challenges we were struggling to understand ourselves.
We found ourselves fighting to defend our children, fighting with people in positions of power who with no knowledge of autism at all were making incredibly important decisions about our children and families.
It is understandable then that, as our kids were growing up, we were getting increasingly concerned for the future of our children and how they would manage when we are no longer able to advocate and fight for them.
So although it felt as if our vision appeared out of a mist, it had been brewing for a while.
Our vision is to make our local community one where our children can continue to live fulfilling lives and be included in everything in a community that embraces autistic people of all ages and stages of life and in all areas of life.
By February 2024, we had started to include other local parents in our meetings and we were becoming aware that there is actually a huge number of families all in the same boat.
Our WhatsApp group started to grow and grow.
Where we are now
We had heard about the AsIAm Autism Friendly Communities initiative run by AsIAm, so we looked into it and decided that it would provide an excellent framework to start us on our way to achieving our vision.
So we formed a committee and signed up to the AsIAm Autism Friendly Communities Initiative on 22nd May 2024 .
We now have a Main Committee of 8 very committed volunteers.
We prepared a constitution and clarified our goals.
In May 2024, we had our first public meeting at Howth Yacht Club, and over 60 people turned up. We were thrilled. We presented our plans and got excellent feedback and more offers of support to help us achieve our goals. We also sought and received information from the community about the direction they wanted us to take.
We started to create sub-committees and working groups made up of volunteers from the community who all want autistic people to be meaningfully included in the community on a daily basis.
Some of us are autistic; some of us are parents and family members of autistic people; some of us are neighbours, friends or colleagues of autistic people.
Click here to see who is who.
If you share our vision, why not join us, and help us write the next chapter of our story?