Sunday, April 1, 2018

Day 1: Autism Awareness Day? Week? Month?

I follow a Facebook Group in which one of the members challenged us to write something every day for Autism Awareness Month, providing topics for each day. The first day is just an intro.

I run an "employee resource group" (ERG) or an internal website where I work that concentrates on autism awareness, support, hiring and research in my company. It has about 600 members so I wanted to share the posts I create with this group. 

When I went to create the post  I saw that I had missed what a colleague posted earlier in the week: A piece about the Autism Gap, and​ Autism Awareness Week. Both of them are worth reading, but the latter gave me some pause, and eventually the topic for this piece.

My colleague's post celebrates the week as March 26th-April 2nd. April 2nd is Autism Awareness Day, and the whole month of April is for Autism Awareness. I'm easily confused (a fun party game), I don't know what authority decides these things, but it occurred to me that it doesn't matter. Whether we are parents of autistic children, looking to change recruiting and HR to accommodate autistic people, researching autism, or #actuallyautistic - we are always aware of autism and always looking for the rest of the world accept autistic people.

Still, I accepted this challenge for this month and I will do my best. I will post each day on a new topic around the subject of autism. Most of the time my expertise will be sorely challenged or utterly lacking. What I hope, though, is that as I share each topic some of you will respond from your points of view as parents or autistics, and we can learn from one another to help spread awareness and acceptance the rest of the year. I hope you will participate and bear with me.

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