Stop! Think... autism?

The autism community deserves better from public-facing companies.

My autistic behaviour is constantly met by accusation and inconsiderate responses. I believe this is frequently for two reasons:

1. They don't stop and think, could there be another explanation for this 'odd' behaviour?

2. Even if they realise I am autistic, they don't know how to support me.

There is no one better to help with these two issues than the autism community themselves. Nothing about us, without us.

This campaign seeks to gain input from as many autistic adults, and parents of autistic people, as possible. To then put that feedback into a 30-minute online training course, that will be provided to public-facing companies.

So much of the autism training out there focuses on the theory behind autism. This training will focus on practical ways a public-facing employee can help autistic people.

The plan:

1. Distribute an online questionnaire to as many of the autism community as we can reach in order to understand what we want companies to know.

2. Build a 30-minute training course online, from the feedback of the community.

3. Contact as many companies as possible and encourage them to complete the free training. This will be tracked on a worldwide and UK map on www.rosieweldon.com/stopthinkautism . Let's see how many companies we can reach with our autism community-built training!

Costs incurred so far:

Survey Monkey (individual advantage for the year) - £384 (this was needed over cheaper options to allow the survey to get traction and not limit the response numbers)

Logo design - £19.41 (designed on fiverr)