Join us for this year’s virtual gala, featuring a night of panels, celebration, and community. This year’s theme is Grow With Us — in recognition of our growth and a tribute to the power of our grassroots to fight for the rights of our community.
The gala will be held on Wednesday, October 30th and we’ll be celebrating our community with our award ceremony recognizing the incredible work of community members, exciting panels, and a speech from ASAN’s incoming Executive Director Colin Killick!
This will be our fifth virtual gala, and we’re so excited that having it online means more people can join in — we hope you’ll be among them! Everyone’s welcome. We’re thrilled to share the gala with disability community members and allies from across the country and around the world, who usually wouldn’t be able to attend in-person. We ask that our gala attendees donate if they are able to do so, but donations are never required to attend.
Be sure to RSVP on Facebook to stay in the loop.
Everyone’s welcome. Let’s celebrate self-advocacy for all and keep working to make our community better for all of us.
For more information about gala sponsorship opportunities, contact Alex Grandstaff at agrandstaff@autisticadvocacy.org.
Schedule
Panels
Sowing Safety: Cultivating Protections and Weeding Out Harmful Policies During the Ongoing Pandemic – 3:00 to 4:45 PM ET
As mask bans have continued popping up and pandemic protections are lifted, many disabled people are disproportionately impacted, facing heightened risks in a society increasingly eager to move on from the pandemic. We know that COVID-19 is still an issue. We’ll be joined by experts discussing how to navigate the continual erosion of pandemic protections, the harm caused by mask bans, and what we can do to support and keep each other safer.
Digging Deeper: Autism and Mental Health – 5:15 to 7:00 PM ET
People with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) often have mental health disabilities too, but it’s harder to get the right care. This is because mental health services and IDD services are kept separate, creating gaps in support. Most of the time, people with IDD can only get either mental health care or IDD supports—not both. “Behavior support services” tend to focus on controlling or changing behavior and don’t meet people’s needs. This can contribute to trauma and mental health burden for many people with IDD. In this panel, we will talk about how the current systems are failing people with both IDD and mental health disabilities, and what changes we want to see.
Award Ceremony
7:30 PM ET
At this year’s Awards Ceremony, we will be honoring several awardees for their tireless work in advocacy, community building, and so much more. We’ll also hear remarks from ASAN’s incoming Executive Director Colin Killick!
Giveaway
We’ll also be raffling off two year-long ASAN memberships at the Trivia Teammates tier, which includes a membership welcome pack, a member-exclusive newsletter, digital phone and computer wallpapers, an ASAN logo sticker, an ASAN mug, a $5 gift card to the ASAN shop, a physical copy of one of ASAN’s books (Knowing Why, Navigating College, Empowering Leadership, Welcome to the Autistic Community, or Loud Hands), an ASAN pen, an ASAN lapel pin, an ASAN tangle, and a T-shirt!