FutureTech asked every child how each session went, and changed the program fast

Rebecca McCash’s starting point on feedback was that some of it would never arrive unless a program went looking for it. As she put it, “not everyone is going to come to you and outwardly tell you a piece of feedback.” She was speaking on the panel on autistic led programs at the Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Sydney on 9 June 2024. A program that waits to be told what is wrong hears from a narrow group of people, and in a program for autistic young people that group may leave out the children who most need something to change.

McCash founded FutureTech, and later in the session she described establishing it before her own diagnosis. When Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, asked about FutureTech early in the session, a panellist speaking for it described a social enterprise running STEAM based social learning programs for autistic young people, with wellbeing at the centre of its design. “You have to feel well and feel safe to be able to learn and engage,” the panellist said. FutureTech had built an entire wellbeing framework from its team’s lived and learned expertise, focused on what wellbeing looks like for autistic people, which the panellist said looks quite different from what it might look like for a neurotypical person. Its programs were led predominantly by neurodivergent people who worked as scientists and software engineers and who came in to share their special interests with the young people. FutureTech’s own crowdfunding page, which is undated, describes Saturday sessions in which participants choose their own STEM learning stations, and calls the model participant driven, with learning led by the participants themselves. In April 2025, ten months after the symposium, the technology publication FutureFive described McCash as founder and chief executive of FutureTech Australia, which it called a social enterprise focused on harnessing neurodivergent talent to build a more inclusive future.