In May of 2018, the Community Living Policy Center (CLPC) asked ASAN to hold a self-advocate summit about community living. At the summit, autistic people talked about what living in the community means to us, and how we can help more people live in the community.
After the summit, we put together many different resources based on what the participants talked about and what we learned from them. Learn more about these resources and download them below.
Community Living: Laws, Rules, and Programs to Know About
This short fact sheet talks about the laws, rules, and programs that the government made to help disabled people live in the community. It goes over the basics of:
- The Americans with Disabilities Act
- The Olmstead Decision
- Home and Community-Based Services
- Money Follows the Person
This fact sheet is available in two versions:
- Our Easy Read Edition. The Easy Read version uses pictures along with larger text, and has more white space.
- A Plain Language Version, at a slightly higher reading level and without accompanying graphics.
What Does “Living in the Community” Mean?
People at the Community Living Summit talked about what living in the community means. They came up with seven big parts of living in the community:
- Freedom
- Helping each other
- Making money
- Paid helpers
- Unpaid helpers
- Finding people and things you like
- Being a part of the community
This resource talks about these seven parts and what they mean. It is available in two versions:
- Our Easy Read Edition. The Easy Read version uses pictures along with larger text, and has more white space.
- A Plain Language Version, at a slightly higher reading level and without accompanying graphics.
What Autism Researchers Should Study
During the community living summit, the participants came up with lots of questions about studying autism and living in the community. After the summit, ASAN thought about what they said, then came up with some more questions.
Together, we came up with seven big questions:
- How can we help autistic people live in the community?
- What is the autistic community like?
- How should we study autism?
- How can we help autistic people stay on track?
- Where should autistic people live?
- How can we help autistic people communicate?
- How can we help autistic people be free and safe in the community?
This list is a good start for autism researchers who want to work with autistic people. This resource talks about these seven big questions, and the many smaller questions that need to be researched in order to answer them.
It is available in two versions:
- Our Easy Read Edition. The Easy Read version uses pictures along with larger text, and has more white space.
- A Plain Language Version, at a slightly higher reading level and without accompanying graphics.
Inclusive Meetings: The Autistic Self Advocacy Network’s Community Living Summit
An important theme that self-advocates talked about at the Community Living Summit was the importance of being included in meetings about policies that affect us. With this resource, you can learn how to do a better job including autistic people in meetings.
There are 3 parts to this toolkit. They focus on what to do before the meeting, during the meeting, and after meeting. You can start by reading the whole toolkit, and then you can look back at each part while you plan your meeting.
This toolkit is available in two versions:
- Our Easy Read Edition. The Easy Read version is split into five parts. Each part has its own glossary, and there is also a separate glossary with all of the terms from every section. The Easy Read version uses pictures along with larger text, and has more white space.
- A Plain Language Version, at a slightly higher reading level and without accompanying graphics.
- Part 1: Introduction
- Part 2: Before the Meeting
- Part 3: During the Meeting
- Part 4: After the Meeting
- Part 5: Words to Know
Or, click here to download all five parts of the Easy Read Inclusive Meetings toolkit as one document.
“The Best Outcome We’ve Had”: Key Themes From A Self-Advocate Summit On Community Living
This report describes and examines themes discussed during our Community Living Summit. The primary themes of the discussion included self-determination, autonomy, housing, employment and economic opportunity, accessibility, policy barriers, and avenues for future research on disability and community living. This is a more technical document than the others on this page.
This report demonstrates how each of these themes relate to community living and will describe what autistic self-advocates felt to be the most important aspects of each of these themes.
These resources, and ASAN’s Community Living Summit, were made possible by the generous support of the Community Living Policy Center at the University of California, San Francisco.