OUR ADVOCACY
A huge part of Spectrum Gaming is our advocacy work.
We are a community that enables autistic young people to develop meaningful friendships and develop a more positive perspective of autism. But we have also created a movement that aims to have a positive influence on society through advocacy and enabling strategic change to ensure the needs of autistic young people are met across the UK. This doesn't just impact on our society, but helps young people to better advocate for themselves moving forward.
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Here are some of the projects our community members are currently working on: ​
Barriers to Education
It is almost universally recognised that the current guidance for supporting young people who are struggling to attend school does not work for many.
But the North West has been at the forefront of collaborating at a multi-agency level around this issue, and Spectrum Gaming has been leading on creating some new guidance alongside key partners.
We have delivered 3 webinars over the past few months that outlined the ambitious project, explained the foundational concepts and understanding that underpin the need for change, and gathered views and input from a wide range of attendees and contributors.
The next step is to continue to collaborate on creating guidance and resources that work for young people. We are working with a huge team of incredible people, including young people, parents, and professionals from across different sectors, to create something that we believe will much better meet the needs of all young people.
This guidance will be launching as a website in the coming months and will be open access for everyone. If you would like to keep up to date with the project and launch, there is an email sign up form on the padlet linked >here<
Youth Loneliness
Many of our members feel Spectrum Gaming is the first place they have felt comfortable developing friendships, and they want to help other spaces and organisations create spaces that can achieve the same for young people who mainstream support often does not work for.
So far, we have run a variety of focus groups and activities to identify the key issues that need to be addressed. The next step is to create some resources that are free to access for all organisations, so they know what actionable steps they can take to make their groups work for all young people. These resources will be co-created with young people and will be put onto a ‘youth loneliness’ website, that will be free for all individuals and organisations to access and benefit from.
Autism Post Diagnosis
Often when a young person receives an autism diagnosis, parents are told what autism is, but young people do not get the opportunity to understand it. We have created a website, called Autism Understood, which was made in partnership with autistic young people themselves as well as professionals, parents and autistic adults. This website is aimed at autistic young people aged 10+ and contains an epic amount of information that will help people understand more about what autism actually is. While the website was launched in July 2023, there are still resources on more topics that we would love to create and add.
RESOURCES WE HAVE DEVELOPED
We have produced a huge amount of resources around topics such as trauma, sleep, anxiety, understanding meltdowns and more! They are available for everyone to access for free from our Resource Library. You can see some examples below, but there are over 30 posts published so far if you check out the full library!
EDUCATIONAL CONTENT
TRAINING
With the wide range of information and resources regarding autism that is available, it can be incredibly difficult to know what is right, and what needs to be done to ensure the best outcomes for autistic people, but we are here to help.
We frequently host public training and talks about autism, which anyone can sign up to attend. You can find out more about our training >here<​