Rey (they/them) and I were standing around in the Gesundbrunnen train station, waiting for our friends to finish shopping for food on our way to the lake one summer. They told me the sweetest story about how when they were small, their mom knew that they needed preparation before going to a new place for the first time, and so she, creative and caring, drew little children’s booklets, explaining what to expect when going to get a blood test or heading out on holidays.
“I wish there was an app like that for adults,” they sighed. They, like many other autistic folks, find it stressful not to know what to expect when going to a new place, and it can also get overwhelming to have to start figuring out how to get service, while also dealing with all the sensory conditions in the new place.
A couple of years ago, I had already started toying with the idea of starting some kind of platform by and for autistic people. I wasn’t sure what it would be like. A community? A directory of service providers? Maybe, since I was already participating in organizing events for the nonbinary.berlin community, it would be some kind of meetup for queer autistic people.
While mulling this over, I suddenly got invited to… a meetup for queer autistic people! I was super excited for someone else to have already started this thing, so I wouldn’t have to figure out all the details on my own. And when I got there, I immediately offered to take an active role in organizing. I ended up organizing the picnic edition of the meetup when the weather was right, and co-adminning the Discord server that was built by a couple of techies on that first meetup.
For me, the meetup itself was heartstoppingly magical: a bunch of queerdos, all sitting together, nervously grinning, avoiding eye contact and fidgeting with our hands. That is, until we pulled out our fidget toys, and started showing them to each other, letting each other try them out, and explaining where to get them. Rey was there, and the fidget toys they crocheted themself were an instant hit.
On one of these meetups, Rey put the idea of the app that explains future experiences to autistic people out there, and said they didn’t need a share in it, but could someone just build it please. When I decided to take a sabbatical from work to start an autistic nonprofit, I realized that that would be a perfect first free digital service for it to offer. From a purely technical point of view, unlike some of the other ideas I had, I could build it as a codeless website. At the same time, it was truly by and for the autistic community, because to become useful, it depended on autistic folks pitching in by uploading info about locations for each other to prep with. Ideally, it would also inspire location owners to improve the sensory conditions and make service instructions clearer. It seemed to already be working: on a visit to one of our first locations, I noticed that an eye-level lamp I reported on in my location entry was off!
So that’s it, the story of how I started out by joining organizers in an existing local autistic community, got this wonderful idea from one of its members (who also illustrated the flyer in the image above) and created prepped.to
Autistic folks on 3 continents have already uploaded locations to inform others before they go to a new place. How about you? Would you like to give it a try?
If you have a place you know, you can share the info with the rest of the community, so that we know what to expect before going there. The Add Location Form is there to record whatever information you have the spoons to put in it, no need to fill all the fields, just the ones you feel like. I will review it for spelling and grammar, and upload it within a day or two.
And in case you got this far, thank you for reading Aut2Aut’s first blog post!
Dr. Gal Schkolnik (they/them)
Founder and CEO
