Building Support Groups

Hello! Welcome back to Neurodiversity Training International HQ! My name is Jude Morrow. For this week's blog, I'm going to talk with you about autism-based businesses and non-profit organisations that seek to support the autistic community. 

Many people with their hearts in the right places set up non-profit organisations to help and support autistic children, autistic adults and their families, careers, and so on. What I have noticed in my work with non-profit organisations is that a lot of them fall into the same trap, where they are set up by a group of like-minded people who want to create positive change, the first step that they take is toward fundraising. This is a trap that so many people fall into for the reason that even though it is a non-profit, it is, in essence, still a business. 

Any business needs to be able to demonstrate what they sell, the services they provide, and testimonials that point to the very good reviews of the service that is indeed being provided. So whenever I speak with non-profit founders and business owners, a lot of them immediately seek to fundraise where it's not always the case that fundraising needs to happen first, that would often need to happen much later on.

Is that a mistake I have made myself? Yes, it is. When I started with NTI, I made the mistake of looking for finance very early on whether that was from the bank or venture capital or anything else, where I was often pitching the NTI and the NTI business and the brand and the model, without actually having any testimonials or actual working products to use. 

Now, what I do, is bring to the table a focus for non-profit leaders, owners, and even business owners too, to actually serve autistic people and move away from the negative-based model. Don't get me wrong, I see a lot of it whether it's LinkedIn or Facebook, there are so many autistic consultants and autistic advisors. It's really great that there are so many voices out there. There are so many perspectives out there, and that can only be a good thing. 

However, as far as building up and working with non-profit organisations, that is more than something that I have experienced in a professional capacity as a qualified social worker in a job that I did for a very long time. It goes to show that having both personal and professional perspectives has been really helpful for non-profits and autism-based businesses.

But please bear in mind that fundraising immediately right off the bat is not always going to work. The second one is if you're using the wrong language, symbols, terminology, things that are just rejected by the autistic community as a whole, then, the non-profit or business isn't really going to take off. The third is that sad stories don't always sell. Having positive wins, positive gains, and an ethos where there's a safe space for autistic children or people to thrive and accept themselves for who they are, then, that is going to be a new breath of fresh air that will help your non-profit or business that serves autistic people. That is what will make you thrive in the end.

Jude Morrow

NTI

www.neurodiversity-training.com