We're NOT Celebrating Autism Awareness Month. Here's Why.
It's April. Time for our annual post about why we're not celebrating Autism Awareness Month.
Curious? Here's why.
We're LISTENING to #actuallyautistic voices. We won't be sharing typical "autism awareness" posts of nonautistic people wearing puzzle piece t-shirts and raising money for organizations that don't center autistic voices.
Want to know what we're doing instead?
We're choosing to AMPLIFY autistic voices. We're going to keep working to hold a mic up to autistic voices of both our students and others outside our community that we love to listen to and learn from.
We're going to KEEP doing what we do. At Reach Every Voice, one of our core values is centering the voices and desires of our autistic students. Nothing about that will change in April.
Today we're offering you a list of 4 sites the feature writing of nonspeaking and minimally speaking autistic people. We're even giving you a good-looking PDF to download so you can share these sites on any Autism Awareness bulletin boards you spot in your schools or communities.
Reach Every Voice's blog: www.reacheveryvoice.org/what-we-think
We'd be remiss if we didn't remind you that our blog has many posts from our nonspeakng students on topics from education to advocacy to poetry to fiction. Use the tag #actuallyautistic to find writing by our autistic students.
Neuroclastic: www.neuroclastic.com
Neuroclastic has an entire section of its blog devoted to the writing of nonspeakers. You'll find some REV students' writing here as well!
I-ASC blog: https://i-asc.org/category/nonspeakers/
If you head to the blog for the International Association for
Spelling as Communication, you'll find a section with writing by nonspeaking authors.
Communication for Education: www.CommunicationForEducation.com / @communicationforeducation
Communication for Education's online course has contributions by more than 15 nonspeaking individuals. They also frequently feature quotes and insights from nonspeaking / minimally speaking autistic people on their Facebook and Instagram pages.
Care to join us in the quest to amplify autistic voices?
Follow along this month (and always) to learn from the real experts, autistic people themselves.
Share your favorite autistic pages and accounts in the comments so we can all KEEP LEARNING!
