With much work and support from our community, we, the dinosaurs, have officially taken over the ASAN office this April. As you can see, we have been very busy running an office and bringing in a special guest to celebrate our change in management. (More information about an exciting upcoming event is at the bottom of this email!)

To be honest, we didn’t expect how much work running the office would be!

Just this past year, ASAN created lots of resources, fought against ableist policies, and worked to make sure all of the autistic community was able to learn about our rights and make our voices heard — and we wanted to take some time to dig through a few of them! Alongside the Policy and Analytics Center, ASAN held the Autism Research for Us Symposium. It's essential that our community has a say in the research that is done about us. We continued working toward equity with resources like "What is Structural Racism?" and Bienvenidos a la Comunidad Autista, the Spanish translation of Welcome to the Autistic Community. We also created resources and hosted webinars to make sure autistic voices were heard on rules that affect us, like our HCBS Settings Rule training and our “Pushing for Change: Commenting on the Proposed 504 Regulations" webinar.

With your support this year, ASAN and the dinosaur team is committed to doing even more through policy work, creating resources, and fighting alongside our community!

There are a lot of issues that matter to our community, and we have a lot of resources in turn. But even our older resources can make a big difference! Lesser known resources, like lesser known dinosaurs, are just as great — like our friend Kongonaphon kely, a 4-inch tall bug-eating dinosaur that researchers think would have made a great pet! As we're rewinding to the Mesozoic Era this month, take a minute to check out our Resource Rewind too!

Like our prehistoric friends, there's a lot of interesting things to dig up in ASAN's resources, but there's also exciting things happening now — like how birds are dinosaurs’ closest living relatives today! We have plenty of toolkits, webinars, and policy work in store. And we're excited for what we've already been able to share, like our mini-grant program and our webinar on #StopTheShock public comments. None of the work we do is done alone; it's only possible thanks to your support. You can also show your support all year long by becoming a member!

It's important to equip our community with the tools needed to realize the full potential of self-advocacy, our community, and our rights through accessible resources, action alerts, and programs like Autism Campus Inclusion (ACI) Leadership Academy which helps train the next generation of autistic self-advocates. Support for our work comes from our grassroots — consider supporting our work today!

As we said earlier, we will celebrate the dinosaur rule of ASAN with a guest appearance by Sue, the T. rex and their friends from the Field Museum! At 6:00pm ET on April 23, our friends from the Field Museum will be joining us in webinar format to talk accessibility, autism acceptance, and, most importantly, DINOSAURS! This event is open to the public, but we suggest pre-registering. Pre-registering will give you:

• A reminder email for the event
• The opportunity to pre-submit a question for Q&A

You can pre-register by following this link. CART will be provided. For additional accessibility needs or questions about the event, please email [email protected]. We’re excited for you to meet our friend Sue and learn more about us dinosaurs!

One last thing! We have a new dino-themed member's only shirt design — check it out below. You can get one for yourself this month by becoming a member. This design won't stick around forever, so join today before it goes extinct!

Autistic Self Advocacy Network

PO Box 66122
Washington, DC 20035

 

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