NAREC's Mission and Goals:
Vision
- Promote access to equitable and inclusive opportunities for neurodivergent and autistic individuals through understanding and specialized supports
- Contextualize disability from a neurodiversity perspective
- Investigate intersections of autism and other identities, such as gender, class, race/ethnicities, and sexuality
- Take a strength-focused approach to providing universally designed supports and remove socially constructed barriers to enhance quality of life
- Build education to employment pipelines
- Foster self-awareness, self-efficacy, and self-esteem
Goals
(1) PROMOTE PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH
- Include the voices of neurodivergent and autistic individuals from across the lifespan as co-researchers
- Establish a community forum featuring research by neurodivergent and autistic scholars and their allies
- Encourage researchers to use participatory research methods through synchronous and asynchronous sharing of resources and recommended practices
- Highlight participatory scholarly research that has the potential to impact policy and practice
(2) CONDUCT RESEARCH TO INFORM PRACTICE
- Foster conversations around research that aims to identify and address research to practice gaps around neurodiversity and autism
- Learn from the voices of various stakeholders (including autistic individuals, families, professionals, employers, and community members) to better understand the needs in the field
- Conduct neurodiversity and autism focused research that seeks to improve the well-being of autistic and neurodiverse people as defined by them
- Promote intervention research that is applicable to home, school, work and community settings
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