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Lived experience, Think Autism Sydney 2025
Georgia Zentrich said neurodivergent people create the communities they wish they had
In short
At Think Autism Sydney in May 2025, panellists described building directories, businesses and advocacy careers because the communities and systems they needed did not exist.
Read it instead, 5 minutesThe transcript
The story
Georgia Zentrich put the panel’s closing theme in a single sentence. “I think we create the communities that we wish we had”, the ADHD educator and advocate told Think Autism Sydney in May 2025, near the end of the session. Neurodivergent people have passions, she said, and many build their communities around them. That had been her own experience in ADHD education and in peer work.
The host, Anita Aherne, had opened the session with her own version of the same story. She introduced herself as the director of Living on the Spectrum, which she described as “Australia’s very first national autism directory”, and said she had built her own community through it. Near the end of the panel she went further. When she started, she said, there was no community, and she had self funded the project to build one and to find her people. It had since brought her back into contact with people she admired, and she said that finding your people was the true value of starting such an organisation.
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Sources the story draws on
- Autism in Australia, 2022 (opens in a new tab), Australian Bureau of Statistics
- Autoimmune Diseases and Neurodivergence with Téa (Australia and New Zealand), The Sunflower Conversations, Season 2, Episode 1 (opens in a new tab), Hidden Disabilities Sunflower
- 'It's being a part of a grand tradition, a grand counter-culture which involves communities': A qualitative investigation of autistic community connectedness (opens in a new tab), Autism (SAGE), volume 26, issue 8; Botha, Dibb and Frost
- 'Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew': Defining autistic burnout (opens in a new tab), Autism in Adulthood, volume 2, issue 2; Raymaker and colleagues (record at PDXScholar, Portland State University)
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