Autistic in NYC

Resources and new ideas for the autistic adult community in the New York City metro area.

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Local groups

 

Our autistic peer-led groups

 

Groups led or facilitated by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group (APLeG)

In-person events this month and next

We will hold one more in-person meeting in May, which will be our last in-person meeting until September. The specific date will be posted soon.

We typically hold in-person meetings in September, October, November, January, February, March, April, and May (skipping June, July, August, and December).

Chat meetings this month and next

The meetings listed below are online chat meetings (text-based) via our Zulip chat room (about which see more info here).

To view the meeting details, you must first join our Meetup.com group (and be logged in to Meetup.com) if you have not done so already. Then, if you are planning to attend any of these chat meetings, please RSVP on the relevant Meetup.com page.

May, 2024:

June, 2024:

About the groups

Groups listed on this page are led or facilitated by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group (APLeG), a group of adults (18+) on the autism spectrum who either lead/facilitate or would like to lead/facilitate other groups for autistic adults.

  1. Our first support / self-help group, based in Queens:  Currently, the main group affiliated with this website is the Queens discussion group, which currently holds text-based chat meetings on the first and second Tuesdays of each month. Before the COVID crisis, it met on the first Wednesday of each month at the Atlantic Diner, 111-16 Atlantic Ave, in South Richmond Hill. (See sensory note. Other, quieter venues will be sought in the future as we grow and hopefully gain some funding.) Please RSVP via Meetup or via this website's contact info.

    The Queens Discussion Group was founded in summer 2019, as a continuation of a group that began meeting in 2018 (and then had a hiatus in early 2019). We hope eventually to have support / self-help groups in other boroughs besides Queens, and eventually in more and more local neighborhoods within each borough.

  2. Career-oriented groups:  We aim eventually to launch various career-oriented groups for those of us who are work-capable. The first of these is Autistic Techies of the NYC Area, founded in February 2021. We hope there will eventually be similar groups for autistic people in many other categories of professions / occupations / jobs. If you would like to help start one, please let us know, and please consider joining the Autistic Peer Leadership Group.

  3. Hobby-oriented social groups:  We are now trying to launch various hobby-oriented social groups. The first of these is an amateur meteorology club, founded in January 2021. We believe that, for many autistic people, the best place to find friends is in groups devoted to specific hobbies. Also we recommend that novice leaders/facilitators begin by leading hobby-oriented groups, which are relatively low-stakes compared to support groups, career-oriented groups, etc.

  4. Demographic groups, e.g. womem:  As of February 2022, we will be launching a Autistic Women's Support and Social Group. We may eventually launch groups for autistic people of other specific demographic categories as well.

  5. Societal/political groups:  As our community grows and develops, we will likely need to form various Societal/political (e.g. advocacy) groups. By a "societal" group, we mean a group concerned with what's going on in society as a whole. These groups will likely include advocacy/activist groups, but our first two "societal/political" groups are just discussion groups, not advocacy/activist groups. They are the Autism Politics Discussion Group and the General Societal/Political Discussion Group, both founded in April 2021.

  6. Longterm visions:  We hope there will eventually be autistic adult peer-led support / self-help groups in other boroughs besides Queens and Manhattan, and in as many different neighborhoods as possible.

    And we hope that there will eventually be autistic peer-led groups of many other kinds as well. See Longterm visions for the autistic community for a list of examples of the many different kinds of groups we hope will eventually exist.

    Perhaps some members of Autistic Techies of the NYC Area can be involved in creating online platforms that will make it easier for groups of autisitc people to organize.

  7. About the Autistic Peer Leadership Group itself:  If you are interested in helping to build any of the proposed groups (or an autistic peer-led group of any other kind), or if you are interested in developing leadership skills more generally, please consider joining the Autistic Peer Leadership Group (APLeG).

    APLeG's main aim is to help our members develop leadership skills. We aim also to encourage the eventual creation of a wide variety of autistic peer-led support groups, hobby-oriented social groups, career-oriented groups, and eventually other kinds of groups too. (For more about the many different kinds of groups we hope the autistic community will eventually include, see Longterm visions for the autistic community.)

    APLeG was founded in March 2021. Although APLeG is based in NYC, our online text-based chat meetings are open to people from other parts of the country and other parts of the world.

Sensory notes on in-person venues

Terminology note

We reluctantly include "Asperger's syndrome" and related terms among our group's keywords on our Meetup.com site. Although "Asperger's disorder" is no longer a valid diagnosis under the DSM 5, people are still being diagnosed with it, especially outside the U.S.A., because ICD-10 still uses it. Even here in the U.S.A., ICD-10 is still (as of 2023) the standard for insurance-billing purposes. It is unclear when ICD-10 will be superceded by ICD-11, which is more consistent with the DSM 5.

We plan to remove "Asperger's syndrome" from our Meetup.com keywords as soon as ICD-11 supercedes ICD-10 here in the U.S.A. Not only is it an obsolescent diagnostic term, but many of us in the autistic community are appalled by the evidence of Hans Asperger's Nazi complicity that emerged in 2018-2019. (See Wikipedia article on Hans Asperger.)

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