When our son was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder in 2022, the Paediatrician handed us a generic list of recommendations of services for autistic children, and sent us on our way. We were completely overwhelmed and had no idea where to turn to in order to find the support we needed. We phoned a few numbers on the list we had been given but they weren’t able to offer us any practical help. 

We spent countless hours over the next few months researching, Googling, and scouring Facebook feeds, groups, pages and comments – entering rabbit hole after rabbit hole – trying to find the right supports for our beautiful boy. The process was incredibly time consuming and emotionally exhausting.

Not long after the diagnosis, our son experienced autistic burnout (a term we knew nothing about at the time!) and we made the decision to cease running our family construction business in order to prioritise his needs and learn everything we could about how to best support him – developing our knowledge around burnout, neuro-affirming care, trauma-informed approaches, positive autistic identity, ADHD, PDA (we are still continuing to learn new things every day!).

Over this time, we also took the opportunity to provide support to other local families and individuals, as Disability Support Workers (supporting autistic children and adults). We discovered that – like us – many other local families were feeling isolated, lost and overwhelmed with the process of trying to find the support and services they needed. We wanted to help! 

We searched for resources online but couldn’t find anything close to what was needed. The Australian Directories we found were not autism-specific, over-run with large national providers, didn’t include a practical search function, or were lacking a comprehensive list of providers in our local area.

We realised that this we could help, on a large scale, by creating the Directory that was missing. This is the end result (and a work in progress!) – The Autism Support Directory.

Thank you for joining our journey. We genuinely hope that our Directory makes a genuine difference in our local neurodivergent community.