Our mission is for autistic people to experience positive wellbeing. That means that autistic people would have mostly positive feelings and meet our full potential in the world.
We believe we’ve found a way to help autistic adults get the support we need and to help make sure autism research focuses on our needs. We’re looking for advisors, research partners, and potential funders to join us in this effort.
To make this happen, we’ve established a company called Independence Through Interdependence (ITI) Assistive Technologies Inc. This company will create apps to assist autistic adults with our unique challenges.
ITI will make sure users have control over our data and can choose to share it with researchers if we want to.
We’ll only allow researchers to access this data, which could be the biggest collection of information about autistic people ever, if their projects meet certain standards set by the autistic community. Users can decide if we want to be part of specific research projects based on our own beliefs and priorities.
Researchers will have to convince us and the community that their projects are worthwhile.
We hope that other tech companies serving autistic individuals will adopt a similar approach.
After covering our costs, the majority of profits will go back to the autistic community. (We may have to give some of them to investors as part of getting started). We’ll use the money to provide direct services, grants, and other forms of support. Our goal is to make it easier for autistic people to advocate for ourselves full or part-time.
For too long, people who aren’t autistic have controlled the narrative about autistic lives. They haven’t always done a good job. It’s time for autistic people to take the lead.
This is a big step, and we’ll make sure to be open and accountable to the community from the start. Apply to be on our board of advisors here.
Whether we succeed or not depends on autistic people, as it should.
Business Model
