With our new round of Knowledge Share seminars starting this month, we asked our Director of Development, Charelene Tait, to reflect on the seminars and the added value that Debi Brown brought to the last round.

We are about to embark on our next cycle of Knowledge Share seminars, this time round we will be visiting Hamilton, Stirling and Dumfries.

Feels like a good time to reflect on our events to date just to reassure myself that we are achieving what we set out to do.

The idea behind Knowledge Share is, in short to show our working. We wanted to give some insight into the minutiae of our work. To show that investing in getting to know and understand the people we support, and to really deconstruct the impact of autism on their development and daily life experience, will enable us to deliver support that empowers and enhances the lives of individuals.

It all sounds very grand but that is after all why Scottish Autism exists.

A key principle for us in our daily work and in our Knowledge Share events is to capture the voice of people with autism. We have achieved this in a number of ways, by videoing people, by asking the people that use our services what they want people to know and by sharing day to day experiences.

One of our most popular and important seminars is when we explore how we enable and support people on the spectrum in the area of sexual health and relationships.

Here, we have benefited enormously from the generous, personal insight of  a young woman who asserts herself as an Aspie, Debi Brown. After hearing Debi speak my first reaction was that there was really no need for the rest of us to be there. She spoke with honesty and sincerity about her experiences as a young woman navigating her way through a whole host of social relationships and situations.  Debi has written about her experiences in her book “The Aspie Girl’s Guide to being Safe with men” so I am not about to try to speak for her but would highly recommend her book if you are a woman on the spectrum or engaged in supporting women. Instead I want to reflect on what she taught me;

That our starting point when we are enabling and teaching people on the spectrum about relationships is their humanity.

To expect people to want to have all sorts of relationships, including intimate relationships as the rule rather than the exception.

To appreciate that a person’s entry point into relationships may be out of step with their chronological age and our general expectations of people of that age.

To take time to understand their hopes and desires.

All of the above are alarmingly obvious when you have a space to think about them but can so easily pushed to the back of your mind, so I guess that is why we keep up our efforts to share our understanding and continue to work to keep the voice of people with autism ringing out loud and clear.

Check out Debi's website at www.aspiedebi.com

You can buy her latest book 'The Aspie Girl's Guide to Being Safe with Men'  here from Amazon