Specialisterne: leveraging the unique skills of Autistics at competitive market terms

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**Specialisterne (Danish for ‘Specialists’) seeks to harness strengths that many people with Autism Spectrum Disorders possess - good attention to fine details, precision, and high tolerance for repetitive tasks. Their consultants bring the joy of work into areas where it is often missing today. Specialisterne’s founder, Thorkil Sonne established a non-profit foundation to spread his social business model for hiring challenged populations. The Specialist People Foundation’s goal is to create jobs form one million “specialists,” - Sonne’s term for people with Autism and other disorders or personality differences that make it hard to find their place in the modern workplace:

…This dream was inspired in part by the book, The Power of Unreasonable People by John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan. “I identified myself as an unreasonable man who does not accept things as they are, but tries to change the world,” he says. “That gave me the courage to set high goals.”

**(source: http://www.odemagazine.com/doc/68/thorkil-sonne-bio/)

In the above example, Thorkil Sonne is advocating on behalf of people with Autism Spectrum Disorders like his son. However it is also very beneficial for those people to be able to advocate on behalf of themselves.

One program that has been designed for just this purpose in an educational setting in the United States, is the The Integrated Self-advocacy Curriculum. The program is aimed at helping children on the Autistic Spectrum speak up. Many people with Autism find it difficult to communicate if they are unhappy or to ask for something. The Self-advocacy Curriculum also helps teachers, therapists and parents to learn how to develop ability in advocating for oneself. That ability can range from understanding what kinds of sensory or social differences a person might have to understanding their civil rights and entitlements.

So for example, if a person has a sensitivity to fluorescent lighting in that it may make it hard to read, they speak up about it. It helps the individuals understand how they can scan any environment, identify what might be disruptive or just completely causing Autistic people to shut down, and then devise a plan for what they can do about it. What am I going to do about it could be as easy as asking, ‘can I turn the lights off’?

The intervention is already being implemented overseas to some extent:

…STEFANIE MENEZES: In Canberra [Australia] there is one person who’s already heard of the curriculum.

The Learning Ways group is a not-for-profit after-schools program set up to help children on the autism spectrum.

Kara Potter is the director there and for the past year she’s been testing it out on a small group. She agrees the results are impressive.

KARA POTTER: We saw some very significant changes in the sense of wellbeing that the children were expressing after being part of the [self advocacy] work that we did with them. In particular we saw children being able to start to discriminate and make decisions for themselves.

STEFANIE MENEZES: Currently intervention programs in Australia are limited and none of them are coordinated nationally.

Mrs Potter believes the curriculum could be very easily adopted by schools across Australia and she says the program would not only make a difference to children but their families as well.

KARA POTTER: I can just see that for Australia long-term that this holds a great advantage in promoting the better health and wellbeing of our growing population of children with autism spectrum disorders.

(sources: New autism program brings hope to families - Yahoo!7; The World Today - Experts back new program for autistic kids 04/07/2011)