This is what I want to do when I grow up. I want to take the saying “nothing about us without us” and make it real for the autistic community, at least here where I live. But instead of waiting to be invited to someone else’s table, I want us to go ahead and solve our own problems and make our lives the way we want it for ourselves.
In particular, this means going beyond advocacy and volunteering, and into the realm of the economy. When we help each other through trade and services where we have a stake in the organizations, we are empowering ourselves in ways that no one else can do for us. In principle, money we exchange with each other helps create an autistic village economy. Non-autistics may question this model, because they may wonder how someone with a “deficit” can help someone else with the same problem. But we are all different and we don’t have the same exact problems, and also things that are problems about us for typical people are often not problems for us directly.
Star Ford 