The Board of Trustees of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network is pleased to announce that Colin Killick will be stepping into the role of Executive Director beginning November 1st. Colin comes to ASAN with extensive leadership experience in the disability rights movement. For the last five years, he has served as Executive Director of the Disability Policy Consortium, Massachusetts’ main statewide disability rights advocacy organization. In that role, he has worked to advance the rights of people with disabilities across a broad variety of contexts, including a successful campaign to grow state housing voucher funding for low-income people with disabilities, overturning discriminatory state Crisis Standards of Care at the height of the COVID-19 public health emergency, and blocking efforts to slash Medicaid Home and Community-Based Services. Colin has been a national leader in efforts to address discrimination against people with disabilities in health care, immigration, and other settings. He has worked to build coalitions between the disability community and other marginalized groups, working to address racial discrimination and language barriers in access to disability service-provision.
ASAN’s Board is also extremely grateful to Avery Outlaw for their service as ASAN’s Interim Executive Director. We are pleased to share that Avery has agreed to step into the role of Deputy Executive Director beginning in November, and will continue to serve as Interim ED until the leadership transition takes place. Avery’s leadership has been crucial for facilitating ASAN’s continued advocacy and operations work over the last several months. Leadership transitions are always a difficult process for an organization, and we’re grateful to Avery for helping keep ASAN’s important work going as this one has proceeded.
We are extremely pleased that Colin will become the third Executive Director in ASAN’s history, continuing to build our organization’s history of autistic leaders working to defend our community and create a more inclusive world for all people with disabilities. We know that his leadership will prove crucial in continuing to support our mission. ASAN has a unique role to play in the autistic community and the neurodiversity movement, and the broader disability rights movement of which both are a part. We believe that Colin brings a unique and important skill set to that work and are excited to welcome him as our new Executive Director starting this November.