What is this?
This toolkit came about by a community of parents (autistic, disabled, and not), autistic advocates, and therapists who work with or support autistic people who are non-speaking, have high support needs, or in other ways get left out of most resources for autistic people. All of us spent years finding resources and frameworks that actually support our kids, and we wanted to save other families the energy we went through.
We have no answers - there are no experts when it comes to our kids and people like them. What we hope this is is a series of maps that can point you towards the things that exist, and give you the warnings / caveats and lived experiences to contextualize these existing frameworks / resources with your kids.
The resources we share are heavily from the non-speaking, and speaking, autistic communities who have shared their experiences and have been the most significant source of learning for us.
We have no answers - there are no experts when it comes to our kids and people like them. What we hope this is is a series of maps that can point you towards the things that exist, and give you the warnings / caveats and lived experiences to contextualize these existing frameworks / resources with your kids.
The resources we share are heavily from the non-speaking, and speaking, autistic communities who have shared their experiences and have been the most significant source of learning for us.
Who is this for?
Our audience are parents, teachers, and therapists, who are *already* steeped in being neurodivergent-affirming, anti-ableist, and autistic-centering. They already get why they shouldn’t do behavioral therapies. They already know why “if not ABA, then what?” isn’t the right question. Those folks are very welcome here, but resources for those questions abound!
Our audience is the parents who already find themselves at the end of that journey (or never were on that journey at all!) but then find there’s a drop-off where they are now the teacher, therapist, and curriculum-designer for their kids and have nothing to go to.
The *students* we envision are those students who the typical resources for autistic kids, *including* the typical resources for GLPs, PDAers, and more, just fall flat or leave you more confused. Know that you aren’t alone! This could be for kids, then, who are non-speaking or minimally speaking and even AAC is not used in a typical way, and/or have co-occurring conditions like dyslexia, dyspraxia, intellectual disabilities, that make it very hard to approach learning in even the typical neurodivergent way.
Our audience is the parents who already find themselves at the end of that journey (or never were on that journey at all!) but then find there’s a drop-off where they are now the teacher, therapist, and curriculum-designer for their kids and have nothing to go to.
The *students* we envision are those students who the typical resources for autistic kids, *including* the typical resources for GLPs, PDAers, and more, just fall flat or leave you more confused. Know that you aren’t alone! This could be for kids, then, who are non-speaking or minimally speaking and even AAC is not used in a typical way, and/or have co-occurring conditions like dyslexia, dyspraxia, intellectual disabilities, that make it very hard to approach learning in even the typical neurodivergent way.
Our Team
The people who made this toolkit include parents, grandparents, speech therapists, teachers, autistic adults, advocates, autistic non-speakers, and part-time AAC users. Those of us who are caregivers and therapists have worked with children of all ages (mostly under 18).
The team includes (more to come later):
The team includes (more to come later):
- Anne McMahon - parent to a non-speaking autistic kid
- Jennifer Cronk - teacher and parent to a non-speaking pre-teen, and blogger on N of 1
- Joyner Emerick - disabled, autistic parent to a non-speaking kiddo, and Minneapolis School Board member
- Lavender Fields - non-speaking autistic, and disability and autism advocate, and blogger on Typer's Trembling. Lavender Fields is the owner and creator of the Nonspeakers Library.
- Nell Quest Curran - autistic parent to a minimally speaking kiddo and head of Product and Technology at Exceptional Lives
- Shubha Balabaer - parent to a minimally speaking 5 year old and blogger on The North Star and the Compass
- Shannon Des Roches Rosa - parent to a non-speaking adult and co-founder of The Thinking Person's Guide to Autism
- Tuttleturtle - a multiply disabled AAC user and part-time mouthwords user. They live by the motto “be who you needed when you were younger,” and have focused their life on improving the lives of disabled children. Previously, this included working in various tutoring and paraprofessional positions, subverting the system and teaching students how to actually live as disabled adults. Currently, this primarily takes the form of admining the Facebook group “Ask Me, I’m an AAC User!”