Not even a week ago, I found their Facebook page where they had a Zoom listen meeting last night. The thoughts and observations are my own, and not of those of the Council as an Ex-Advocate. The Council is part of the New Hampshire State Government, so from my previous understandings, is compliant to RSA 91a the state laws that govern public records/open meeting/open government law that something that Kelly (unrelated to Steven) Ayotte should know, but doesn’t, and she’s the Governor-elect. The meeting wasn’t recorded but I saw that it was automatically transcribing the meeting, so I may have said more than I initially thought…

The Council was created in 2008, several years after a Task Force, the latter fact wasn’t said because I had to look that up in the midst of the Zoom meeting, because I assumed the Council went as far back as 2001. Anyways they claimed they were on a 2 year hiatus. As you probably would know there wouldn’t be a state Council if there wasn’t a population enough that would need it.

One of the self advocates had suggested a need to move away from programs and not supports, as the state has moved away from a medical care perspective to a more psychological one (this is paraphrased by the way.) Apparently states like North Carolina and California seem to have better programs. Surprised on the former state, I’d be skeptical on the latter. One thing I did challenge this advocate was the statement of moving away from autism awareness to autism acceptance. The reason? Well day programs don’t get me, and some other parts of society doesn’t get me, etc. I told the Council that “you can’t have acceptance if there isn’t enough awareness”.

The overall sentiment on adults with autism in the Granite State is really “you have to make it yourself.”

Preachin’ to the Choir!

Other families were on the zoom call too with the struggles of not receiving services  Because the way the Zoom app handled chats in one comment I was assuming I was replying to the last bubble, it got sent as a DM instead so I decided to wait till everyone was done to just follow up on the subject of “falling off the cliff” (transition aged schooo students who have nothing after their 21st birthday) of telling the Council I was on the waitlist from graduating high school to receiving Medicaid Waiver services for 16 months, I did say “18” but my Ltown math was not adding up in retrospect. There was mention in the call from one of the advocates on “sex” but I extended it to relationships (this was the reply sent as a DM instead.)  I basically summed up the need for relationships of all ages, because of “the intergenerational trauma” that one former member I can remember was not very positive about.

They are going to try to meet more in person after December, on a monthly basis, hopefully in person.

By no means am I want to advocate once again in between the subject on adults and autism acceptance/awareness I said something like “I advocate too much and too often”, I used a hand intentionally off the camera frame to show how young I was in height of exhaustive advocacy to which the apparent moderator (I assume this because she read-back) “that’s not your job” to advocate in that way.

While the people are really nice groups of people, I wonder if this is the venue where I can just organize an executive summary of what I observe to a governing body, since the self advocates don’t care and the family support groups could care less. And even when I was involved in the Family Support Conference, I ensured that any electronic communications I assumed was not protected by confidentiality or could be seen as a public record. I don’t want to rush into conclusions, I just wanted to be heard by an apolitical group that under theory could hold the people accountable where in other venues was impossible. Even if it’s talking to a group of people.

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