Interview between Speaker 1 (Meg) and Speaker 2 (Finn Gardiner)
Episode 72: Organizing for a Better Future with Finn Gardiner
[Introductory music]
Welcome to the Two Sides of the Spectrum Podcast. A place where we explore research, amplify Autistic voices, and change the way we think about autism in life, and in our professional therapy practices. I’m Meg Proctor from learnplaythrive.com.
Meg:
Before we get started, a quick note on language. On this podcast, you’ll hear me and many of my guests use identity-affirming language. That means we say ‘Autistic person’ rather than ‘person with autism’. What we’re hearing from the majority of Autistic adults is that autism is a part of their identity that they don’t need to be separated from. Autism is not a disease, it’s a different way of thinking and learning. Join me in embracing the word ‘Autistic’ to help reduce the stigma.
Meg:
You know those social skills curriculums that we used to use in our practices? The truth is that authentic social communication is just too complex to be made into a curriculum. AND here’s something else that’s true: in order to truly attend to our Autistic clients’ well-being, we must be able to thoughtfully respond to difficult social communication situations both in our sessions and in our clients’ lives. We have a course that’s like nothing else out there that will help you navigate those situations in a thoughtful, skillful, confident way. The course is called Let’s UNMASC: Understanding the Needs and Motivations of Autistic Social Communication is now available. It’s taught by Autistic SLPs Rachel Dorsey and V Tisi. It will be registered for AOTA and ASHA CEUs and we are applying for ASWB CEUs as well. In this course Rachel and V teach a framework for addressing complex social communication situations and then apply it to a series of messy, complex, true-to-life case studies. The case studies include situations like parents pushing for behaviorist approaches, adolescents struggling with mental health issues, In these modules, you’ll get to listen in as your instructors talk through the four intricate case studies. These cases include true-to-life factors such as young clients who are struggling with acceptance and belonging, teens who are reluctant to trust professionals after a series of harmful experiences, and parents who want traditional social skills training. The case studies consider romance, dating, sexual assault, cultural issues, and intersectional considerations.
You’ll explore what it means if a child’s behaviors make others uncomfortable. Who needs to change? What should the clinician do? Where do we draw the line?
Your instructors take you deep into the nuance of Autistic social communication, from communicating through scripts, to connecting over interests, to craving a feeling of belonging in a world designed for neurotypicals. You’ll walk away with your passion to support authentic connection in all contexts reinvigorated, and with a concrete framework to help you actualize that desire.
Get the details and grab your spot at learnplaythrive.com/unmasc
Meg:
Welcome to episode 72 with Finn Gardiner. In this episode we learn so much about our guest’s life, and how experiences with behaviorism and shame have impacted him. We also learn about how he built an extremely impressive career of advocacy, and how he navigates systems of power and privilege. Finn shares with us what he wishes educators had done to support him when he was an Autistic child in school. We also go into the politics of charities versus direct aid for supporting marginalized folks.
I’ll tell you about our guest, Finn Gardiner is the Director of Policy and Advocacy at the Autistic People of Color Fund. He is a Boston-based queer, Black, and disabled writer, designer, community organizer, speaker, editor, researcher, advocate, activist, and artist. Finn has a Master of Public Policy degree from Brandeis University He’s spoken at the White House’s 2016 LGBTQ Disability Day, the United Nations’ World Autism Day event in 2019, and other venues.
Finn has an extensive background in policy advocacy and communications—before joining the Fund, he worked as a communications specialist for the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy, and before that, he was a policy fellow at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. Finn’s professional interests include inclusive education, competitive and integrated employment, accessible technology, cognitive accessibility, housing justice, and community living—though that’s only a small sampling. He’s especially proud of his ability to tackle thorny matters of policy and make them easier to understand.
Meg:
Hi, Finn, welcome to the podcast.
Finn:
Hi.
Meg:
I am really excited to talk with you today and you are involved in so many things. Your work has included graphic design, policy accessibility, like plain language summaries, and editing, and various additional types of advocacy. This is probably not even a comprehensive list of everything you’ve done. Could you explain to us, as we get to know you a little bit, what your work or your advocacy looks like, and how you decide what to prioritize?
Finn:
That is a really good question. So, right now, I’m mostly focused on racial justice and disability equity. I work with the Autistic People of Color Fund, which is an organization that promotes racial equity and economic redistribution by providing Autistic people of color with microgrants for them to, you know, help them with their rent, or help them with housing, help them with getting job interview clothes, help them pay for food, and we — but that’s not all. We also give grants for people who want to work on personal empowerment projects or creative projects. Because we recognize that we also want to support people in their joys as much as we do when they’re in despair or in trouble. We are also expanding our policy and advocacy work to attend hearings or sign on to letters that, to promote or oppose policies that will affect Autistic people, particularly those of us who experience racial marginalization as well.
And that kind of goes along with everything else that I’ve done in the past that focuses on disability equity. For example, I’ve done a lot of work about surrounding healthcare and supporting healthcare equity. So, several years ago, I was on a UN panel about autism, autism and health care. And I’ve also been involved in focus groups and other community projects involving autism and healthcare. I’ve also done work on assistive tech, accessible technology, inclusive technology. I was on a UN panel for World Autism Day a few years ago back in 2019, where I talked about that. And then, I’ve also done a lot of work on employment equity as well. So, a major problem that exists in the US — and probably in other countries too, but I know it definitely exists here — is that people with disabilities are often paid less than the minimum wage if they are determined to be unable to work competitively. But that means that people are getting paid pennies on the dollars. It is a serious equity problem. There’s, there’s a section in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), Section 14(c) that authorizes this, that authorizes states to receive services — I mean, certificates that allow them to pay less than the minimum wage. I testified about this back in 2019. Yeah, it was 2019, the last time I actually travelled out, properly travelled since because that was just before COVID hit. So, there has been quite a bit that I’ve done. But I think that the thing that ties all my advocacy work together is a focus on equity, a focus on redressing historical wrongs, to move toward a place where we can exist equally with others, as opposed to being kind of pushed to the margins, being told that we’re less than everyone else.
Meg:
That is such important work. And I love how you’re giving us this bird’s eye view. And then, you’re also on the ground doing the day in, day out of it, it sounds like. I’ll link to your projects in the show notes so people can go deeper into them. And I want to talk in just a second about the content of your work because you go in several different directions that are all really important for us to spend some time thinking about and learning about as we try to understand the lives of our Autistic clients, and the role we play in them. I’m gonna I ask you one more question about you before we go there. We often talk on the podcast about people building their lives on their strengths, and you’re doing so much important work. I’m just curious in what ways that’s true for you in your work, and what some of the barriers are that you’ve faced.
Finn:
Okay. So, you know, I do try to build things based on my strengths. And I try to focus on things that involve thinking deeply about these important issues. What challenges have I faced? Sometimes I’ve been in situations where I’ve worked with advocacy groups or organizations where I didn’t have a lot of autonomy, where I felt that I was, I didn’t really have the space to speak up when I needed to, that I didn’t really have the space to set my own pace for my work, or kind of develop my own ways of doing things. I felt that I was trapped. And sometimes, it’s hard for me to focus when things get a little tedious, when things start stop being about — when stuff stops feeling as though it’s effective, when stuff feels as though I’m just, you know, pushing paper. And all work is like that, whether it’s social, whether it’s, whether it’s advocacy, or, you know, just working in corporate America. There’s always, there are always going to be those times. But it’s hard when you struggle with occasional attention problems, where you are constantly in need of something that’s stimulating, where you need to be — where you need to stay focused. Also, it’s hard for me to focus sometimes if what I’m doing is unrelated to an intense interest I have, though that tends to appear, that tends to be a problem more in non-advocacy jobs, because I have an intense interest in advocacy already. So, that makes things a little easier.
And I’ve also dealt with not necessarily deliberate racism, but a lot of systemic racism, a lot of ignorance about the intersections between disability, specifically autism and race. I’ve dealt with a lot of — and when working in cross-disability coalition’s, I’ve sometimes come across people who, although they are familiar with disability rights in general, they don’t know as much about cognitive or developmental or cognitive or developmental disabilities in the same way that they do physical disabilities. I encountered that a lot when I was doing organizing several years back where they would be, the leaders would host these meetings that were not very autism friendly. People were talking over each other all the time. When people called in on the phone, there was feedback. And I was not the only Autistic person there who was frustrated by this. I kept going, because it was still important for me to go. But there were a lot of problems with these meetings. And like we tried to, you know, it was really difficult.
Meg:
I appreciate you sharing your story. I feel like if we’re not careful, as therapists, so many of our, quote unquote, ‘interventions’ can really wind up being asking Autistic people to tolerate things that feel aversive and to do things that aren’t within their set of interests, or preferences, or things that matter to them. And it’s nice to be able to kind of fast forward in your life and hear you say, yeah, feeling like a cog, a paper pusher, doing things that felt like they didn’t matter didn’t work for me. So, I went a different direction. And now, here’s what I’m doing. I think we can miss that when we’re looking at children and telling them to be compliant. That that’s really not necessarily setting them up for a meaningful life.
Finn:
No, it’s not. Because that was basically what I was taught at school. And, you know, I didn’t like, you know, school was kind of a mixed experience for me. I mean, there’s some parts of school that I liked, especially after I got past elementary, especially high school went better for me. But elementary and middle school, on the other hand, I remember constantly being told, like, “Sit still and do all this work,” that was tedious. And, frankly, often too easy. I feel like kids who are in classes where the work is all too easy or too hard tend to struggle a lot. And a lot of times, I would be, you know, I was one of those kids who were very strong in certain areas. I was very strong with — I had a lot of, I had relatively strong reading skills. I was very good at you know, I was good at, you know, I was a fast reader. I still am. And I tended to catch on pretty quickly. And so, I would be sitting in class and they’d hand out some worksheets, and I would just fill it out like I was, I would, it just took me a couple of minutes to fill out the worksheets. I’m done. I’d be done first, every time. Like, the other kids would still be sitting there and [swishing sounds], and I was just getting so frustrated because — and I remember complaining, “This is too easy. This is too easy,” or on the other hand, there are things I struggled with. Although I was strong on the verbal side, math was kind of eugh. Specifically, I understood the concepts. But I had a hard time with execution. I had a hard time sitting there and calculating by hand when I had to do long multiplication and long division. I still — see, the idea of doing long multiplication makes me wince.
Meg:
It’s not even a life skill. We have calculators on our phones.
Finn:
I know, right? Like, yeah, you know, I — yeah. So, I had to sit there doing long multiplication. And I remember staying up all night trying to do this. And, you know, nobody cared that I was just bored out of my mind. I understood the concepts. But because I could, I had a hard — like, my attention span wasn’t there. When I tried to do this tedious long multiplication, I got in trouble. And I still can’t do long multiplication well. Like, I ended up like getting really bad grades in high school math, or middle school math, rather, because I couldn’t, because long multiplication and long division threw me off so much.
Meg:
What a waste of the moments of your life. In retrospect, you’re just wasting —
Finn:
I know, what a waste.
Meg:
Yeah.
Finn:
Especially since it’s the concepts you need to get it right. Because nowadays, you can pull up your phone, and you can go on Wolfram Alpha, or one of the other problem solvers and just hit, like, you don’t need to sit there calculating the, you don’t need to calculate the area of — you don’t need to calculate the surface area of a cylinder anymore. And yet, the GRE and the SAT’s still have that stuff on there. And, you know, hand multiplication, like the depth and multiply, you know, 570, like, 56,000 times. And like, and I remember, this is back in the 1990’s, that these worksheets, they would have, like, a hundred problems on them. I don’t think they do drills like that anymore.
Meg:
I hope not.
Finn:
Because when I was a kid in the 90’s, they did. I remember coming home with — oh, God, I hated math homework. I hated it so much. Like, it’s like flashbacks to math homework. Even though it was like, you know, 28, like, 20-what years, almost 30 years ago. [Laughs]
Meg:
I want to talk about schools. In one of your talks at the Disability Intersectionality Summit, you called schools ‘a cult of compliance’. Can we talk about what that means and how we can work against it?
Finn:
I believe ‘cult of compliance’ was a phrase I borrowed from David Perry, who is a writer about disability, who writes about disability and education. Yeah, I’m pretty sure I borrowed that phrase from him. But anyway, the cult of compliance is idea that, basically, your goal as a teacher is to make your kids comply, that compliance is more important than anything else, that if you stray outside that then you’re in trouble. Like this highly restrictive religious environment, compliance is treated as a value in itself. And that is often the case for Autistic kids. They’re not only Autistic kids, often other kids have disabilities, often Black, and you know, Latino kids as well. In which you are taught that to comply is to be a good kid. To be a good child, to be a good student, you must comply. And there are methods that are used to enforce this compliance that are often coercive and often abusive. For example, applied behavioral analysis or ABA. And I was subjected to ABA as a kid.
Meg:
Do you want to talk more about that experience or would you rather not?
Finn:
Sure. So, my ABA mostly focused on making me look less Autistic to the general public. So, when I would flap my hands, you know, to kind of, as a sensory experience I would flap my hands. And I’d be told, “Quiet hands, quiet hands, quiet hands,” you know. If I don’t flap my hands for a week then I get a sticker or something, you know. Or I get to have like five goldfish crackers. Or, and I remember and, you know, there are, like, you know, I did this with a speech therapist back in the very early 90’s. So, I would have been — like, the ABA stuff started. I can’t — I’m not sure when it started, but I know that it was in full swing by the time I was four. And I was working with the speech therapist for about three years. This was at my, this is from pre-school to first grade. And I may have had ABA before then, but I don’t remember. But yeah, ‘cause it started pretty young. But yeah, so I would be working with a speech therapist who would have me, there were some parts of what she taught me that were useful, but they were not ABA. For example, doing social skills role plays, like what would I do if I was at a store or something. I felt like that, the role-playing stuff was helpful. And doing worksheets about similes and idioms and other abstract expressions, that was helpful. But the actual ABA with a quiet hands and all that, no. It’s like, I used to dance in the hallways, like, “No dancing in the hallways, quiet hands,” and all that quiet hands crap. It was bad. And just, I felt that there was — I felt that I was broken, I felt that something was wrong with me, I felt that, you know, I felt that it was all focused on fixing me. And it was really, and the focus was so much on compliance and so much of what they wanted as opposed to what I wanted. If I had a meltdown, it was all my fault. And, you know, even though I stopped having intense ABA past the age of seven or so, I still have to deal with that mentality. I still have to deal with this high control environments, both at school and at home because my parents were pretty abusive. And so, it was a — it was kind of a, you know, powder keg. And I ended up really disliking certain parts of school because I would be in these classes where — and often, my academic needs weren’t being met because quiet hands came first.
Meg:
We’ll put some links in the show notes. We have an episode on ABA. And, you know, some people say, “Oh, ABA is different from that now, there’s the new ABA.” And it’s still focused on observable behavior more than a child’s authentic, deepest needs as a person. And as a lot of our listeners know, there’s a lot of research linking any therapy, quote unquote, ‘therapy’ that asks you to mask to depression, suicidality, and PTSD. So, we’re —
Finn:
Yeah, all of which I’ve dealt with, all of which I’ve dealt with.
Meg:
So, in your talk, you mentioned that educators didn’t allow you to define yourself.
Finn:
No, they didn’t. They kind of set the tone and told me to fit into this box. And a lot of these teachers, they don’t care, they didn’t listen to me. And I’m not saying they’re bad people. This is what they’ve been taught. And if they — and they tend to, if you have a disability, often you get objectified. You get seen as something rather than somebody. And when that happens, you’re often forced into these situations that are unhealthy, but everybody’s like, “Oh, we’re just a black box. We see this observable behavior; we’re going to fix it.” So, everything was focused on my behaviors as opposed to my feelings. Nobody cared about my feelings, just my behaviors.
Meg:
You’ve kind of been on a journey, it sounds like, of undoing that messaging in your life. And you talk a lot about shame in your work and how you learned to reject the politics of shame to develop a healthier sense of self. I’m curious if you can talk a little bit about the role of shame, how it develops, and how we can undo it.
Finn:
I think that the shame arises from dealing with constant prejudice against disabled people, against Autistic people. And this idea that it is shameful to be Autistic. And I think a lot of that actually arises from ABA and similar therapies that kind of pathologize autism, that kind of treat it as though it is something to be cured. It isn’t, like, and so certain organizations promote this attitude, chief among them Autism Speaks, which is sort of infamous for it. And these ads that say things like, “I’m autism, and I grabbed your kid.”
Meg:
Ew.
Finn:
Yeah, like, oh, or things like that. Or like, Autism Speaks isn’t pretty — has had some pretty terrifying ads. I’ve never seen them myself, but I know about their existence. And these, and more, you know, and a more horrifying case, is the more horrifying cases include filicides of Autistic children as well as children with other disabilities. Which, you know, the idea that you deserve to die because of your disability, that you deserve to be killed… So, there’s a Disability Day of Mourning that’s held every year on March 1. And on Disability Day of Mourning, we remember the people who have been killed by caregivers because of their disability. And many of these people are Autistic. I mean, many of the victims are Autistic. And I’ve organized some vigils for this event in the past. But it is incredibly depressing, but it also teaches us that it is important to avoid devaluing disabled people, it is important to acknowledge our humanity, it is important to avoid this kind of attitude and so but anyway, go back to shame. This kind of stuff is what I ended up internalizing. No, nobody tried to kill me. But I felt like I was being killed inside. Like everything about me was just devalued. And again, like a part of it was that, like, my parents were also very abusive. They kind of treated me like something rather than somebody. And I’m not even the only person who notices, like other people who have talked to them have observed this as well. And, you know, I was — not only was I being shamed and treated badly at schools, I was also being treated badly at home. I was being yelled at and screamed at for like hours on end. Because they didn’t care about my feelings at all. And so, it’s kind of, and I think that’s often the case with parents who are focused on normalizing their kids and refuse to accept the idea that their kid is different from other kids without, you know, it’s like, you know, my mom even called me a burden, which is like, so ableist, isn’t it?
Meg:
It is. Kids — I just heard this on, I think it was Dr. Becky Kennedy’s podcast, she said kids are supposed to be inconvenient. We come out inconvenient.
Finn:
Exactly, exactly. Kids are not convenient. There’s no such thing as a convenient kid, even a kid without — like, they’re crying and they’re up at night and they want you to read a story to them. No kid is convenient.
Meg:
No, I can confirm that. I have very wonderfully inconvenient three- and six-year-olds. A lot of folks on here, we do have some ABA practitioners listening who I would argue are probably just not doing ABA and the ethics of that with how they bill is, I suppose, up to them. We do have a lot of SLP’s, OT’s, social workers listening. And I want to say, we’re not off the hook. I was trained as an OT with deeply behaviorist principles for how to support my Autistic clients in terms of, I mean, there was very little self-determination for what matters to them in terms of goal setting, and no critique of teaching neurotypical social skills to neurodivergent people. I think behaviorism is insidious in all of our practices. And I appreciate you showing us sort of the range of harm that it causes, that it’s part of the same paradigm, people treating Autistic kids like a burden who don’t deserve to exist and the impact that even the more subtle forms of ableism have on folks internally. And I know a lot of us want to have a different impact on our Autistic clients. And people are in hard situations. They’re working in very compliance-based schools, or I work with therapists or have therapists take our trainings who are OT’s or SLP’s in ABA clinics, trying to undo harm, trying to do things differently. I’m curious about your experience in school, what are some concrete things that any provider in your life could have done to help you develop a more positive sense of Autistic self-identity sooner?
Finn:
Well, they could — the first thing is they could have listened to me when I was under stress. They could have listened to me when I was telling them I was being bullied. They could, they could have listened to me. The first thing these people could have done was listen to me. The second was maybe talk to me about what I wanted and what I needed. And, you know, kind of taking that on board because I was very clear about what I wanted, what I needed a lot of time. I’d be like, this needs to be, like, this schoolwork needs to be more challenging, I need more time to do this; this is too hard, this is too easy. You know, please stop these bullies from making fun of me every two seconds. Please give me more creative assignments. Just give me some more space just to be, as opposed to focusing just on my behaviors. And I just felt that something was wrong, though. And I tried to speak up. I spoke up, I just got in trouble for it.
Meg:
Which is the opposite of helpful. If somebody had listened to you, kids are incredibly insightful about what their needs are, and how they can be successful. That’s really helpful to hear and really concrete for those of us thinking about supporting Autistic folks, is starting with listening and being curious and moving that towards advocating.
Finn:
Yeah.
Meg:
I want to circle back, I put a pin in this in my mind when you were describing your experience in all of these different organizations, you often center intersectional issues within the Autistic community. And in our conversation today, you noted, and you’ve often noted in your work, how many Autistic spaces are predominantly white. Can you talk a little bit about the difference between trying to build community in mostly white spaces, versus building community with others who are more likely to share your identities and your experiences?
Finn:
Okay. So, I think that I find common ground with most Autistic people regardless of race, just to put that out there. But, in predominantly white Autistic spaces, I find that a lot of times when — I don’t think this is often deliberate — but there are often cases in which, you know, Autistic-run organizations or groups are often led by white people, and the people of color involved do not have much autonomy or control. I’ve encountered this a few times, and it has been frustrating, to say the least. I’ve also seen situations in which people are just not, they’re just not conscious of kind of the double bind that people get in when they’re dealing with both ableism and racism at the same time. I think that’s often the case with, you know, other experiences as well. You know, if people don’t experience classism, they’re not gonna see how that affects, you know, working class or poor Autistic people, you know, if they’re men versus women, or non-binary people, or cis-people versus trans people of any gender, or, you know, people who were born in the US or any other country versus immigrants. I feel that that’s often the case where you’re not going to — and I don’t expect everyone to understand everyone else’s experience. And I don’t think that we should sort of balkanize each other, balkanize into separate communities. I don’t think that’s what we need to do. I feel that we need to learn. I think that the onus is on white Autistic people to learn more about Autistic people of color and to understand how these intersections work and then work together. That’s what I think the goal is. But unfortunately, a lot of people just don’t get that or they think that to be anti-racist is to be colorblind, to ignore the idea that there are historical processes that have led to the systemic marginalization of people who are racialized as non-white in this country and elsewhere.
And I think that a lot of that, you know, and I think that you can advocate an anti-racist stance, without acting as though, without — you can advocate anti-racism without spreading this idea that if you happen to be from a privileged background, you’re somehow bad, is I don’t think that’s how it works. Often, sometimes I see activists acting as though if you were born with certain advantages, you’re bad. And to me, that feels like original sin. I just, that’s not — I think that’s counterproductive. What I do think is that if you were born from, you know, born in a, if you were born with certain privileges, then you should be aware of that. You should be aware of that and try to understand the way you take space in a community. Not but that’s different from saying you’re a bad person, because you can come from a marginalized community and say all kinds of hateful and bigoted things. You can be completely, you know, for example, you know, my parents are hardcore, anti-queer conservatives, and they’re Black. And they’re, you know, black voters for reactionary candidates whose names I will not mention, but they rhyme with stump. But yeah, so I just, there are so many cases in which, you know, there’s so many cases in which this idea of like, people of color, good; white people, bad. That’s not how it works, because we’re dealing with people, and most of them are gonna be fine. You know, 90% of the people you deal with, regardless of color, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, whatever, 90% of them are going to be decent. And then you get 10% where they’re gonna be jerks. And we just need to get the 90% together so we can fight off the 10%.
Meg:
I love that. That would be very exciting. I appreciate you tying that together with shame for us, that we don’t learn and grow from shame. We learn and grow from listening and reflecting.
Finn:
Exactly, exactly. You don’t, yes, shame just makes you feel bad, it makes you — tears you up inside. You don’t learn from it. There’s a difference between guilt, which pushes you to make restitution to the people you’ve hurt. That’s different. Shame just means you beating yourself up, you’re beating yourself up. It creates more stress. And stress has long term effects, not just your mental health, but your physical health. Because stress can lead to, you know, high blood pressure, can even lead to diabetes, it can even lead to other chronic inflammation. It can lead to a lot of other chronic health conditions. And so, it is not a good idea to, not a good thing to be constantly under stress. And I think that when you deal, you know, there’s this concept, minority stress, that a lot of people deal with. And there’s also another concept called allostatic load. There’s a lot of research on that, and how chronic stress can lead to long term physical conditions as well as mental health ones. And so, these have long-term effects on people’s lives. This is not just, oh, we can just brush it off and ignore it. No. The dealing with the racism and the ableism and all these other -isms and phobias and insert bad thing here, dealing with this, you know, dealing with the constant infliction of shame from the people that are supposed to care about you, like parents, and teachers, and therapists, it adds up.
Meg:
And I think that constant stress drains us of the energy that we need to fight back, too. I want to tie this back into a recent episode with Reyma McCoy Hyten where she talked about what it means to live in a society where to get your needs met, you have to be able to self-advocate, or you have to have someone advocating for you. So, when you bring in this narrative of stress, and of how draining that is, then folks who are under this sort of chronic stress, especially multiply marginalized people, you’re gonna have even less resources to do the unfortunately necessary work of advocating, to frankly stay alive. It’s a really nice tie in back to when you were first talking about doing direct aid. I think this concept makes a lot of people, especially middle-class white people, uncomfortable, the idea of mutual aid and of direct aid. It’s a diversion from — it’s a redirection from the charity model that people have become accustomed to.
Finn:
Yeah.
Meg:
And I think it’s a really, really important shift. So, before we start to wrap up, can you talk a little bit more about direct aid and why it matters?
Finn:
Okay. So, direct aid, make sure that that respects the autonomy of the people receiving the aid. We just say, “Here you go, here is $100. Here is $500.” It’s, our grants are up to $500. So, we give people maybe like, $100 to $500. And they go and use it for whatever reason. They give us a reason when they apply. But we’re also not the police here. We want to make sure that we respect people’s autonomy. We want to make sure that we are not trying to dictate what people need, because we’re very much focused on liberation. And we’re very much focused on meeting people where they are. And the problem of the charity model is that it’s often patronizing. It’s often paternalistic. And there’re often a lot of restrictions on what you can use the money for, or they don’t give money at all, they give aid in kind. Which is frustrating when so much especially in this capitalist society requires having liquid assets, having money to pay for things. And you’re not going to be able to pay your rent with vouchers unless you’re on Section Eight. Or sometimes they give you money, but it has to go straight to the landlord. Or, you know, there’s usually some other way around it. It doesn’t go to you. And that is frustrating when — and but we want to make sure that people, and often, the charity model will go — and often, in the charity model, there’s this assumption that, oh, we know better than you what you need. So, it kind of goes back to what we were talking about, these teachers and parents who don’t listen to Autistic kids. It’s we know more, we know you better than you know yourself, which is something my parents actually told me, no, they know.
Meg:
I appreciate you weaving all of those threads together for us, because they do, they do all connect. I want to ask you one more question as we wrap up. What’s something you’re hopeful or excited about, or something that’s bringing you joy now? It can be advocacy, or work related, or not.
Finn:
Okay, so the thing that I’m really excited and happy about right now is the fact that I have been studying Russian for the past several months. I’ve always wanted to learn it. I mean, I’d poked at learning Russian for — it’s kind of my special interest right now. I’ve been focused — sorry, I poked at trying to learn Russian a few times over the past several years. But this is the first time I’ve actually sat, buckled down, actually tried learning it, like actually seriously tried learning it. I, you know, I’ve been using a lot of websites to learn the grammar. I’m taking a class, I’m taking an evening class. And, you know, I have apps that help me remind me of certain grammar things. Sometimes I listen to YouTube videos in Russian. I don’t understand, you know, about, like, I understand maybe about 10% of what people are saying, but it still gives me an opportunity to listen. And the more I learn, the more words I learn, the more I understand what they’re saying. If I go back and listen it’s like, oh, yeah, I know what that means. I know what that means. I know what that means.
Meg:
That is so cool. I feel like learning something new feels so good on your brain as an adult. We don’t do it often enough.
Finn:
That’s why I have St. Basil’s Cathedral behind me on my Zoom screen.
Meg:
I love it. Tell us what are you working on now? And where can we find you and your work online?
Finn:
Okay. So, right now I am doing a lot of policy and advocacy work at the Autistic People of Color Fund, as I mentioned before. Right now, we are doing a lot of work around legislative advocacy and trying to get the Judge Rotenberg Center shut down once and for all. And we’ve been doing a lot of other stuff as well. We have some policy briefs in the works. We published ones about food justice and housing not too long ago. And we are currently working on ones about employment, education, and mental health. They’re still in the works. The rest of the team needs to review what I’ve written. But, you know, they’re in the works. And you can find me at my website is finngardiner.com, though it needs to be updated. It’s F-I-N-N-G-A-R-D-I-N-E-R.com. And to learn more about the Autistic People of Color Fund, you can go to autismandrace.com — A-U-T-I-S-M-A-N-D-R-A-C-E.com. And there you can learn about what we do at the fund, and you can also find links to donate to our cause and help us be able to distribute more money to folks that need it. So, that’s autismandrace.com. Please visit, and if you can, please donate.
Meg:
Yeah, it’s such an important group really appreciate the work you’re doing there. And if folks haven’t heard of the Judge Rotenberg Center, we’ll link to some resources about that on the website as well there. They’re the place in Massachusetts that’s torturing Autistic kids with electroshock quote unquote therapy.
Finn:
Yeah. Yeah.
Meg:
And billing insurance for it, if I’m not mistaken.
Finn:
And states are paying for it. New York State is sending kids to the JRC and they are paying for it, and JRC is not cheap.
Meg:
Thank you so much for all of your advocacy and also for your time today, Finn.
Finn:
Thank you.
[Ending music]
Thanks for listening to the Two Sides of the Spectrum podcast. Visit learnplaythrive.com/podcast/ for show notes, a transcript of the episode, and more. And if you learned something today, please share the episode with a friend or post it on your social media pages. Join me next time, where we will keep diving deep into autism.
