A Message from ASAN Activist Dora Raymaker: Tell the Autism Society of Oregon to Include Self-Advocates!

[Guest guest]

The Autism Society of Oregon (ASO) has posted a survey which includes a box

for comments at the end, and several other areas asking about general

satisfaction with the organization.

The background is that ASO is an ASA branch which refuses to acknowledge the

inclusion of autistic people in their policy or on their board. This

organization tokenizes the people they are intended to serve by doing things

like wanting autistic people to design their fund raiser T-Shirts, but at

the same time refusing to even answer questions related to the idea of

including an autistic person on their board of directors. ASO does things

about us without us.

This survey gives an opportunity for self-advocates and advocates in Oregon

to make it clear that it is NOT OK to have an autism organization that

refuses to take direction on an administrative level from real autistic

people. I'm passing this along in hopes that you will pass it to other

advocates who believe as I do that there should be " Nothing About Us Without

Us, " and who will make it clear in comments that ASO needs to seriously

consider the model of those ASA branches which do include autistic people

directly in their administration.

Survey information:

As the Autism Society of Oregon begins planning for 2009, we'd like to

hear from you about how we've done in 2008 and what you'd like us to do

going forward. To this end, we've created a simple on-line survey that

will take you about 5 minutes to complete. You can access the survey

by going to this web link:

*http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/survey-*<http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/survey\

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If you could complete this survey no later than Sunday, November 23rd,

we'd greatly appreciate it.

Dora Raymaker

Co-Director, Academic Autistic Spectrum Partnership in Research and

Education

http://aaspireproject.org

--

Ari Ne'eman

President

The Autistic Self Advocacy Network

1660 L Street, NW, Suite 700

Washington, DC 20036

http://www.autisticadvocacy.org

--

Ari Ne'eman

President

The Autistic Self Advocacy Network

1660 L Street, NW, Suite 700

Washington, DC 20036

http://www.autisticadvocacy.org