Aspies For Freedom

This idea was stated before.  Take a building, say a small apartment, and have aspies move in. have a common meals and common activities. make it in the city so we can work and visit the world of the NT's. It woild be like a mini-commuinty within the community. sort of like aspietown.

What do you think?

She is gracie one of our two dogs.

I personally think it's a slick idea. Trick is finding a place where it's feasible to actually have a very low volume of guests or have a specific week or two which you announce to be the time for it; that way it wouldn't just be one or two people at a time showing up and going home. In the next few years with awareness spreading I'd really like to think that the demographic challenges will shrink bit by bit but it may take at least another 10 or 15 years before you get more than half the aspies out there to know that they are as such let alone sell them on the idea that they want to meet other aspies.

Something else someone could do if they were seriously thinking about this would be to get together with other people who wanted to do this, who had the business savvy to pull it off, and actually start another business (aspie owned and run) to subsidize the retreat. Not to say that you'd want them to cover a huge ammount of the expenses but just enough to where the prices would be low enough so that you could have hundreds show up rather than a handful or two.

What we'd need then is some nice sized aspie investment banks, CPA firms, software companies, and engineering tech companies to keep the college grads busy bringing in the $$ and then maybe some aspie run bars, clubs, photo shops, or whatever. Seriously, if the gay community can pull it off like that why can't we.

I'd be in favour, so long as it didn't turn into an extended coffee morning for NT parents of Aspie children like most other resources and services seem to be  :roll:

Tbh, I've never met another Aspie.  I mean, I haven't met anyone who's been officially diagnosed.  (Actually, I haven't been officially diagnosed yet either).  I've had my suspicions about some people I've known though, but I don't think they've had an inkling because they're not really into psychology and stuff, whereas I learned a lot about AS through... I think my curiosity was piqued by some television programmes or articles that I recognised myself in them, and then I read more about it, because I was interested in psychology type stuff because I was referred for therapy due to being physically and emotionally abused in my childhood.

I have felt a bit isolated over the years because of not knowing anyone like me.  It would be really good to have a kind of retreat to spend time with people like me, or just to take some time out, when the pressures of every day life get too much.

I'm in a support group right now, still just me and 4 other guys with AS, and with respect to the concept of AS I'd kinda built I was pretty surprised. Not to say that they were nothing like I'd guessed they'd be, just that a lot of the things I thought would be common outward or behavioral identifiers weren't there.

All of us are dx'd as well and it's interesting to see that they and even the one other guy I met IRL before all this who was HFA would never have struck me as aspie. Unless they had told me something that was real indicative of their struggles, I never would've thought AS if I had met them on the street.

I agree, we tend to be pretty demographically scattered and have a really wide spread - on one end you've got people in the upper-middle class to possibly the richest guy in the world, on the other end you have more people who are either lower middle class, some struggling to hold down minimum wage jobs, and some who can't work at all. I think that our financial dependence issues though may be much more conditional based on job competition, misunderstanding of AS, etc. to where if we did go through with something like this there'd probably be a much higher margin of gainfully-employed aspies than there would be otherwise. I mean in one sense we would need the much more shadow-AS people (sure, I'd volunteer in this one) to be out front and handling clientelle. I definitely don't think it would be without plenty of inherent problems but I get the impression that most of those could be tackled fine. Yeah, there'd still be enough people who wouldn't be able to hold jobs and I can definitely understand that but the people who are right on the boundary where they have all the skills and discipline but can't get past the disability radar wouldn't be getting their self-sufficiency struck down anymore.

I think the hardest part is, like you said, finding a way to actually walk the talk IRL.

I know that a couple people from AS Hangout, in the U.S. had been mentioning something about Alice Park, Australia. I don't know anything about that area but I almost get the impression that to make something like that would it would almost need to be an international get-together. It could be done but it would take years of planning and years of community-wide advertising to where almost everyone online knew the date, when it was comming, and had more than enough time to be really interested in the idea or at least have it sink in. As for opening and managing businesses yeah, none of that's ever real easy, just that I think those of us with shadow AS might need to be the ones to start all that infrastructure and build the jobs. If anything it would be more of a reason for aspies to get at least bachelor's degrees in things like advertising, accounting, finance, communications, operations management, management and labor resources, etc.

I hope you didn't take too personally what I said about I thought it was a good idea except I would hope it wouldn't turn into a parents' coffee morning?

I wouldn't have any problem with NT family members.

And I also wouldn't be intolerant of children per se.  It's just I'd be wary of any discussions in an environment with lots of parents/children turning into discussions about getting a diagnosis for a child (which is much, much easier than it is to try and get a diagnosis as an adult), trying to get assistance and access to support services (again, much easier for children than it is for a child).  

My thoughts on this are that all the 'official' psychiatry/psychology and educational and social services are already geared up towards helping parents with ASD children.  There is a real lack of support and services, however, for adults, so I'd just be concerned, from a totally selfish perspective, that I'd want to gain something valuable for myself out of the experience, and that I wouldn't sit through loads of discussions about getting children statemented and speech therapy or whatever, when I'm sitting there thinking 'You're children have all their lives ahead of them, they've been diagnosed, or are in the process of being diagnosed, they have access to the kind of services that I couldn't even dream of as a child', yet I'll be 40 soon, I'm still struggling to get an official diagnosis, in fact my GP/psychologist are strongly resistant, even though they don't have any expertise or knowledge about AS, and I'm more than half way through my life and I've *never* had any support *whatsoever*.

So I'd just like a bit of 'me time', thanks.  I'd just like a wee bit of the help and support that's now available to the younger generations, so I can try and get my life back on track.

Sorry if you think that's selfish or intolerant of me.

Um i dunno if that is a typo, but I live in Canada.

As for where? Everywhere would be the answer.  I was thinking on a local scale.  there would be these aspie apartments in a whole bunch of places. of course there will probabably be an initial experament.  Just to clarify I was thinking on scale of 10-15 people. modist goal I would think.

The run your own business idea is ok, but to run an apartment building even a tiny one you need to have a business larger than your typical mom & pop store.  I would think we would need some kind of funding from the goverment or some other organization would be nessisary.  

As for Mish's two boys i am afraid of going to have to give the NT one up for adoption.  just kidding, of course they will be allowed to stay!!! :grin:  

As for who will  be allowed to stay. I think that would be done case by case. But i think that we might have to for evidence of Autism just because there might be NT's who will clam to be an aspie just to get cheaper rent. It might also be required by the goverment if they are involved.

I shouldn't have used the term retreat in the topic title it was misleading.

The idea is though it should be run by aspies. do these sheltered housing work like that or are they run by well-intentioned NT's? I have never heard this term.

The problem with this is that this is being done by NTs!!!

Look at all those home run by people like JRC and ACLD. Autistics living together under NT rule. They are given partime jobs in the community then shipped back to the home at night. They are not given access to come here or other aspergian sites.

I know that land costs would always be an issue..but building can be thought "outside the box" as it were, and when doing that, one can save money.

Here are some links to ponder...

http://www.calearth.org/  and
http://www.cobcottage.com/

I know of other alternative forms of housing...earth sheltered homes are just one of them, with http://www.earthshelteredtech.com/Default.htm being one of my favorite..but they are a bit pricy.  I really dig alternative homes...a good way of screening out those who simply want a place to live, and those who want something pretty to park their hummer in front of, ya know?  

I have seriously thought of trying to get some sort of gevernment assistance to get land and contract out one of the first two guys, the cob cottage people or the calearth group depending on site and climate.  I would need help from an NT as far as navigating the burocracy and such. I am just a bit too litteral and naive for all that still.  I know of a couple of people who are disabled in general who could use housing assistance, and would not be against offering housing to anyone who really needs a break, based on a true disability...

I would really dig doing that,, as well as the idea of moving to Californai, may be schoooling out there at some point, but wouldn't even know where exactly to do it...I know I like the Houston area, but I suppose it would be clever to make a few in a couple different areas, some nearer to big cities and some not so near to them.

An extremely interesting idea.

Acquiring cheap tracts of land would indeed be a problem. Had all of you lived in Sweden (where I reside), I would've recommended purchasing land in the northern parts of Norrland, our northernmost province. It's very cheap, contains very few people and have vast expanses of nature without lots of noises and distractions. Property value is very low as well, I believe.