In the first few years, a lot of the organization lived in my head, in my relationships, and in the things I was personally able to make happen. That is probably true for many small nonprofits in the beginning. You start with an idea, a mission, a few programs, and a lot of energy. You say yes to things because they matter. You build relationships one at a time. You learn as you go.

But at some point, if the work is going to last, the organization has to become bigger than the founder’s ability to personally hold every decision, every relationship, and every piece of institutional knowledge.

That is the transition The RILEY Project has been making.

Over the last several months, I have spent a surprising amount of time thinking about things that do not always sound very exciting from the outside: governance, Board structure, Advisory Council roles, insurance, budgets, strategy, partnership agreements, operating systems, and how an organization decides what it should and should not build.

I have come to understand that this is not separate from the mission.

It is the infrastructure underneath it.

A nonprofit cannot ask a community to trust it simply because its ideas are good. It needs stewardship, accountability, financial discipline, clear roles, thoughtful partnerships, and people around the table who can challenge the work as well as support it.

That has meant strengthening our Board, becoming more intentional about governance, and building an Advisory Council that brings together people with different kinds of expertise and lived experience. It has also meant asking a harder question about every new idea: does The RILEY Project actually need to own this?

More and more, the answer is often no.

Extraordinary organizations are already doing extraordinary work. We do not need to become the provider of every service or create a new program every time we identify a gap. In many cases, the better question is whether we can connect people, contribute something distinctive, or build something in partnership.

We cannot do this work in silos.

The challenges people face across education, mental health, employment, disability, healthcare, and community life are too interconnected for any one organization to solve alone. We increasingly have to come from a coalition mindset.

That means recognizing where other organizations already have deep expertise, where our strengths complement each other, and where shared work can create something stronger than either organization could build independently.

Our partners fuel the work in different ways. They offer expertise, trust, relationships, reach, resources, lived experience, research, access to communities, and perspectives that The RILEY Project could never hold on its own. They also make the work more accountable, because partnership forces us to ask what we uniquely contribute rather than assuming we should be at the center of everything.

I increasingly think that one of The RILEY Project’s most important roles is not to own every solution, but to help create the conditions for collaboration.

To bring people together who do not usually share a table.

To connect ideas that are often separated by sector.

To help lived experience, research, and practice inform one another.

And to turn relationships into something useful: a resource, a referral pathway, a new practice, a shared project, a pilot, or simply a stronger connection between people who should have known one another already.

That coalition mindset is central to how I think about the organization now.

The work gets stronger when it is shared.

That shift is also reflected in how I think about the organization internally. For the first few years, many of the relationships around The RILEY Project went through me. The next stage is not concerned with replacing those relationships. It is about building an organization where relationships become shared infrastructure, where Board members, advisors, partners, and community members know one another, strengthen one another’s work, and help carry the mission onward together.

The website has been part of that evolution too. We have been rebuilding and expanding it because the organization needed a public identity that reflected what The RILEY Project has actually become. Storytelling is still central to the work, but the organization is no longer only about collecting stories. The work now also includes self-advocacy, youth agency, convening, partnerships, research, community, and the question of how lived experience can lead to practical changes in the systems people move through.

I have also spent a lot of time trying to make the strategy match that evolution.

One of the clearest things I have learned is that a mission is not the same thing as a strategy. You can care deeply about many different ideas and still need to decide what an organization should actually pursue.

For The RILEY Project, the through-line has become clearer.

Storytelling can create recognition. Recognition can create self-understanding. Self-understanding can create agency. Agency can create connection. Connection can reveal shared patterns. And when people and institutions recognize those patterns together, there is an opportunity for collaboration and for something in the system actually to change.

That is where belonging comes in.

For more than a year, much of my writing has returned to that word. I have written about the art of gathering, third spaces, self-advocacy, connection, and what happens when people find a place where they do not have to spend so much energy explaining themselves.

The more I have thought about it, the more I have come to believe that belonging is not only a feeling.

It is formed by infrastructure.

It is determined by who gets listened to, who has agency, who is invited into decisions, how environments are designed, and whether the systems someone moves through actually connect.

Too often, they do not.

A student can spend years learning how they learn and what supports work, only to arrive at college and have to explain everything again. College becomes employment, and the process starts over. Healthcare operates in another system. Mental health may operate in another. Community life is completely elsewhere.

The problem is not that people do not care.

Incredible schools, nonprofits, employers, researchers, clinicians, advocates, families, and community leaders are carrying out meaningful work.

The problem is that too many of them are working in parallel.

That idea is at the center of what The RILEY Project is building next.

Next week, we will be publicly sharing the Belonging Summit: Belonging, Learning, and the Future of Community, planned for Summer 2027 in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Summit will bring together educators, students, and young people, families, employers, researchers, advocates, nonprofits, and community leaders around a simple idea: creating schools, workplaces, and communities where people can fully belong and contribute.

But I don’t want the Summit to become another conference where hundreds of people gather, have a great day, and then go back to their separate worlds.

The conference is the visible part.

The longer-term idea is the Belonging Collaborative, a year-round network designed to connect people and institutions, create smaller gatherings, support focused working groups, develop shared resources, and turn relationships into something useful after the Summit.

If hundreds of people attend the Summit and enjoy themselves, I will be thrilled. But I will care much more about what happens afterward.

Did two organizations meet that should have known one another years ago? Did a family discover a resource? Did a school change a practice? Did a young person influence a real decision? Did an employer learn something that changed the way a workplace was designed? Did an idea become a partnership, referral, pilot, or shared resource?

That is the kind of impact I want to understand.

And because I am sharing this here before the public launch, I also want this to be an invitation to join the work.

There are many ways to help. You may know someone who should be part of the conversation. You may work for an organization that could become a partner. You can support the Summit or Collaborative financially. You may know a storyteller, researcher, educator, employer, community leader, or resource we should know about. You may have expertise, space, relationships, or perspective which could strengthen the work.

And if you have lived experience, I especially want this work to be shaped with you, not simply about you.

Next week, I am not simply announcing a conference.

I am sharing the next stage of an organization that I have spent years imagining and the last several months trying to build more deliberately.

There is still an enormous amount to do.

But for the first time, the infrastructure underneath the mission is beginning to feel as real as the mission itself.

Belonging.

It’s the word that I have written about for the past year, almost two, and still it feels like there is more to discover.

The crux of The RILEY Project has always been about creating a sense of belonging, fostering agency, and ensuring that neurodivergent individuals have a voice. Over the past three years, that has taken shape in a few different ways.

One of the newest is our redesigned website, which we recently launched with Dooley Design Group, an accessibility-first design agency with experience working with nonprofits and schools specializing in neurodivergence.

You can see the new site here:

https://therileyproject.org/

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I have learned that building a sense of belonging—ensuring that there is an environment where neurodivergent individuals can thrive—requires a multifaceted approach.

Visual design has always been one of my challenges. I find it difficult to visualize concepts when they are not presented in writing, and it still slows me down at times. The process of designing the website made me think not only about accessibility, but about how I wanted The RILEY Project itself to be represented.

What I realized is that the breadth of what we do is not really a list of services.

The website needed to be something else. A connection point.

A place where people can find stories and ideas, learn about our work, and hopefully see opportunities for connection.

That word—connection—keeps coming up for me.

Last month marked three years since The RILEY Project obtained nonprofit status, a huge milestone that took almost two years to accomplish. I am forever grateful to the founding board members who helped me create a nonprofit out of fragments.

Fragments.

Another word I have used a lot in my writing.

I have been trying to work through why I feel like it is so important to convene, to connect, and to network. It’s the connections that I see in my work that drive me to see the disconnection.

There are so many people doing important work. There is expertise in schools, nonprofits, research, families, workplaces, and communities. But those people and ideas are not always connected to one another.

That realization has also affected how we think about governance at The RILEY Project.

We have been working to make sure that our governance keeps pace with the realities of the needs we are seeing. For us, that meant making an intentional decision to have a small governing board alongside a robust Advisory Council.

Our Advisory Council represents a wide range of experiences across education, nonprofits, and other areas, with particular expertise in neurodiversity.

That expertise matters.

But so does the range of perspectives around the table.

The questions we are asking cannot be answered by one person or one area of expertise. I think there is something powerful about bringing people together who may be looking at similar problems from different angles.

And I have been hard at work on one question in particular:

How might we create environments where people actually feel like they belong?

And how do I explore that question in a way that relates to the mission of The RILEY Project?

That is where the Belonging Summit comes in.

The Belonging Summit is planned for Summer 2027 in the Bay Area and will bring educators, students, families, employers, researchers, advocates, nonprofits, and community leaders together around one question: How do we design schools, workplaces, and communities where people can fully belong and contribute?

The RILEY Project began with a focus on neurodivergent individuals—their stories, their agency, and their voices. Neurodiversity remains an important lens for this work.

But I have also come to see that the question of belonging extends across environments and sectors.

I do not want the Belonging Summit to simply be a one-day conference.

The larger vision is for the Summit to be the beginning of an ongoing, cross-sector Belonging Collaborative that continues working throughout the year.

What exactly that collaborative becomes is still being shaped. It may include working groups, pop-up convenings, shared resources, and other ideas that emerge through the people involved. I also want its governance and scope to be developed with early partners rather than decided entirely by us.

That feels important to me.

If this work is about connection, then the process itself should be connected.

And when I look at The RILEY Project now, I realize that convening is already happening in different ways.

We convene through stories.

We convene at conferences.

We convene through the expertise and relationships of our Advisory Council.

Our website is another place for connection.

And the Belonging Summit and Collaborative are an opportunity to think about what happens when we bring those connections together more intentionally.

Maybe that is what I have been trying to understand through all of this.

There are people with expertise. There are organizations doing important work. There are students and families who know what they need. There are educators, researchers, nonprofits, employers, advocates, and community leaders holding different pieces.

Perhaps the pieces are not always missing.

Perhaps they are disconnected.

And maybe part of the work of The RILEY Project is helping those pieces find one another.

As we begin building toward the 2027 Belonging Summit, we are looking for Founding Partners interested in helping shape this work from the beginning. There will also be sponsorship opportunities for organizations interested in supporting the Summit.

Materials are coming soon as we prepare for the public launch, but if the idea resonates with you—or you see a connection between your organization and what we are building—I would love to hear from you.

You can learn more about The RILEY Project at

https://therileyproject.org/

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Belonging.

Almost two years later, I am still writing about it.

And I still think there is more to discover.

I have been thinking about what it means to build an organization around belonging without turning the word into something abstract. Belonging, agency, and community are used so often that they can quickly become buzzwords. They appear in mission statements and strategic plans, often as separate goals, without much consideration of how they depend on one another. Community does not necessarily create belonging, and belonging without agency can still leave people feeling like passive recipients rather than participants. The question underneath all three is whether people can show up authentically, contribute, and have some influence over the environments they are part of.

Over the past several months, I have been trying to professionalize The RILEY Project. That has meant working through strategic planning, governance, budgets, board expectations, partnerships, and the building blocks required for the organization’s future. It has also meant wrestling with a difficult idea: the founder is not the nonprofit.

That distinction may sound obvious, but it is harder to put into practice. When an organization begins with one person’s lived experience, ideas, energy, and relationships, the line between the founder and the work can become blurred. Growth can start to mean that the founder is simply doing more—carrying more projects, more relationships, and more responsibility—rather than building an organization capable of existing beyond them.

Writing a strategic plan forced me to confront that. A strategic plan is not supposed to be a place where every promising idea gets recorded. It is supposed to establish a direction. It should help an organization decide not only what it will pursue, but what it will leave to others. It should create enough clarity that the work can eventually be shared.

For a long time, I believed The RILEY Project needed to become bigger by launching more projects and offering more services. But a longer list of programs does not necessarily create more impact. Building something new does not always make sense when meaningful work already exists. In some cases, creating another program may add to the fragmentation rather than solve it.

Working through the strategic plan helped me recognize that one of The RILEY Project’s greatest strengths may not be its ability to duplicate existing efforts. It may be its ability to create conditions in which people and organizations are better able to connect and thrive.

The pattern I keep seeing is that thriving becomes more possible when responsibility, knowledge, and relationships are shared. This is more than placing two logos on the same flyer or calling an introduction a partnership. Real collaboration requires each person or organization to bring something distinct and to recognize what it cannot responsibly provide on its own.

I have seen this happen when one organization already had trusted relationships with young people, another brought experience with storytelling and lived experience, and a professional facilitator had the training to hold the space responsibly. No one had to claim ownership over the entire solution. Together, they could create an experience that connected storytelling with self-awareness, self-advocacy, and community. The work became stronger because each participant understood both what they could contribute and where they needed someone else.

I have seen the same pattern in community events. Schools, nonprofits, educators, families, and advocates may serve many of the same people while rarely having opportunities to understand how their work intersects. Bringing them into the same room does not always produce a new program, but it can create relationships that continue after the event. A family may discover a resource it did not know existed. An educator may meet someone whose expertise fills a need at their school. Two organizations may realize they have been trying to solve adjacent parts of the same problem.

Every connection reduces friction.

That matters because so much of the burden is currently placed on individuals. Families are expected to navigate among schools, specialists, community organizations, and support systems without a clear map. Young people repeatedly explain their needs and histories to people who may not communicate with one another. Organizations serving overlapping populations may be unaware of what is happening only a few miles away.

We often describe these fragments as gaps in services, and sometimes they are. But sometimes the services already exist. What is missing is communication, coordination, or a pathway between them. The organizations may be doing excellent work in separate rooms of a house that does not have a shared table.

That is what I mean by connective tissue. It is the infrastructure that allows separate efforts to function as part of something larger. Advisory boards, collaboratives, shared events, and cross-organizational partnerships are often treated as special projects formed for a specific grant or moment. When the project ends, the relationship often ends with it. But collaboration should not be an exception reserved for occasions when a funder requires it. Building and sustaining relationships across institutions should be recognized as part of the work itself.

The RILEY Project began with storytelling, and storytelling remains central to its identity. But the goal cannot simply be to collect and publish personal stories. Asking someone to share something vulnerable creates a responsibility that extends beyond publication.

Stories matter because they reveal what institutions often fail to see. They help one person recognize themselves in someone else’s experience. They can change how an educator understands a student or help an organization see that the people it serves should also shape its decisions. A story can reduce isolation, expose a barrier, or identify a condition that helped someone thrive.

But storytelling alone is not belonging. It is one of the conditions that can make belonging possible.

My own understanding of belonging is complicated by my experience in education. Much of my life was shaped by the sense that I needed to prove myself. I had to excel, persist through adversity, and demonstrate that difficulty had made me stronger. The focus was often on whether I could overcome the obstacle, not on the conditions that had created it.

There is a contradiction in my experience because I attended schools specifically designed for neurodivergent students. Those environments gave me support and opportunities that I may not have received elsewhere. Yet being in a specialized setting did not automatically create an internal sense of belonging. An environment can be designed with neurodivergent learners in mind while a student still feels pressure to earn their place within it.

Access and support matter. Specialized environments matter. But a placement, accommodation, or legal right cannot by itself create belonging. An environment can make belonging more possible, but it cannot manufacture it. There is an exhaustion that comes from trying to excel and belong at the same time, particularly when you have learned that your needs will be taken seriously only after you have demonstrated enough achievement.

For a while, I placed much of my hope in the idea of a physical space. I imagined a place where people could gather, organizations could share infrastructure, and relationships could develop without every interaction being scheduled or programmed. A permanent location made the vision feel tangible. It offered an answer to the fragmentation I kept seeing.

I still believe that place matters. There is something powerful about entering a room and knowing that you were considered before you arrived. Physical environments communicate belonging through their design, expectations, and small cues. But I may have been asking one space to carry the entire vision.

A building cannot be the strategy by itself. The deeper work is helping many environments become more capable of supporting belonging. That environment may be a school, a workplace, a community gathering, a partnership among organizations, or eventually a permanent home. The location can change. The conditions should remain consistent.

Those conditions include accessibility from the beginning rather than as an accommodation added later. They include meaningful relationships, multiple ways to participate, and opportunities for people to shape decisions. They require institutions to treat lived experience as a form of expertise. They also require people to be seen as contributors, not only as recipients of help.

This understanding has changed how I view professionalization. Governance, budgets, policies, and role clarity can sound administrative and separate from the mission. I have started to understand them as part of the conditions that make the mission possible. An organization cannot credibly talk about belonging while depending unsustainably on one person to carry every program, relationship, idea, and decision.

Clear governance creates conditions for trust. Shared leadership creates conditions for sustainability. A responsible budget creates conditions for continuity. Defining the roles of the board, the Executive Director, partners, and community members makes it possible for people to contribute without confusion or unspoken expectations.

The founder is not the nonprofit, and sustainability is not separate from belonging. It is part of building an organization where responsibility is shared and the work does not disappear when one person can no longer carry all of it.

I still want The RILEY Project to grow. I want it to reach more people, create more opportunities, and become more sustainable. But growth cannot simply be measured by the number of programs it launches. It should also be measured by whether relationships become stronger, whether young people have more agency, whether organizations share knowledge, and whether families encounter fewer barriers while moving through complicated systems.

These outcomes are harder to communicate than a simple menu of services. They are also harder to measure. Convening and connecting involve labor that is often invisible because the result may be a relationship, an introduction, or a shared idea rather than a product that can be easily counted. Yet those relationships can become the foundation for programs, opportunities, and changes that no organization could have produced alone.

Belonging does not erase adversity, and it should not be treated as a cure for every difficulty. But it changes the conditions in which people experience adversity. To belong is to be able to participate without constantly translating yourself. It is to know that you can contribute rather than simply receive support. It is to exist within an environment that does not require you to become someone else before your needs, ideas, and presence are taken seriously.

The RILEY Project does not need to become the only answer. It does not need to recreate every service already available or build another isolated institution. Its role can be to bring storytelling and community together through a neurodiversity lens, connect efforts that have remained fragmented, and create environments where people and organizations can find one another.

The work may not fit neatly into a traditional list of services. But perhaps that is the point. Our role is not to create belonging for people. It is to build the conditions in which belonging becomes possible.

But the one constant in my life has always been music.

To me, it doesn’t matter what genre I’m listening to. I need a connection to the lyrics. Music was the first place where I was able to understand the world around me and pick up on life’s complexities.

Being dyslexic, there has always been a translation between the patterns I see and the words on a page. It isn’t like mathematical patterns. It’s more like the strings of an instrument. I can hear the connections before I can always explain them.

That translation is the ability to understand the complexities, or even the mundane, not by reading words aloud, but by hearing lyrics. When I hear a song that stays with me, I usually look up the lyrics. I become obsessed. It’s like I’m searching for those strings to harmonize.

My parents played the soundtrack of their youth in the car. There was Bruce Springsteen, the Eagles, Tina Turner, mixed in with whatever was on the radio. There was no explanation. It felt instinctive. I knew my connection to reading, writing, and music was different. That didn’t mean there was something wrong. It just meant I experienced them differently.

I can still remember singing along to The Rising by Bruce Springsteen. I didn’t understand the context then. I was only a year and a half old when September 11 happened, so the album couldn’t evoke the same emotions it did for people who lived through that day.

Instead, “Come on up for the rising” felt like an anthem. Looking back, I wonder if it became a kind of call to persevere, or maybe even to thrive.

I still have a special connection to that album.

“You’re Missing” still gets me, not only because of the loss, but because I can picture a spouse living through the unimaginable while still having to continue with the mundane parts of life. That has always felt very human to me.

When I was around nine years old, my parents took me to see the Eagles. I became fascinated with Timothy B. Schmit and his voice on “I Can’t Tell You Why.” From there, I started researching records, producers, session musicians, and the connections between artists. I wanted to know who played with whom, who wrote what, and why those songs mattered.

In high school, I discovered Lori McKenna.

McKenna, a mother of five and one of the most respected songwriters in country music, writes about marriage, motherhood, heartbreak, and everyday life. They’re experiences I haven’t lived, but somehow they still feel familiar. She has a way of making ordinary moments feel significant.

Recently, McKenna mentioned on her Substack that she has mild dyslexia. Of course, that made sense to me. Not because she talked about misspellings, but because of the way she writes. She finds creativity in the mundane.

One of my favorite songs of hers is “Giving Up on Your Hometown.”

I still live in my hometown, even though it doesn’t have the small-town charm she writes about. I know the song isn’t about me.

But that’s the translation.

The backyard trees become my diagnosis. “You can’t keep everything the way you want it” becomes the educational protections afforded to students with disabilities that sometimes feel like they’re slipping through the cracks. The ghosts become parts of my educational experience that I still carry with me.

I don’t think that’s what Lori McKenna intended.

My brain may not be connecting the dots the way every songwriter intended, but there is something there. Something that creates a sense of protection and belonging.

Maybe I’ve been searching for that sense of normalcy all along. I thought that if I could find it, maybe I would feel understood. Like I belonged.

Music feels like the table I get invited into.

It’s where I can hear lyrics not simply as words strung together, but as poetry. That’s why Lori McKenna can write about losing her mom at a young age, and it still feels universal even if you haven’t experienced that kind of loss. The details belong to her. The emotions belong to all of us.

If music disappeared tomorrow, I think that’s what I would miss most.

I would lose the place where the way I think makes sense. Where my obsessions are understood by the artists who created the work, even if that relationship is unrequited.

For someone who has spent much of his life translating the world, music has always been the place where that translation was understood.

My family is Irish, therefore we are Catholic.

There is a certain finality to that statement. Growing up, church felt like home. The rituals of Easter and Christmas, occasionally going with grandparents, it felt like another place to be with family. There wasn’t this deep personal faith that I felt I could share with others, or that my testimony would have any particular sanctity in the eyes of God. Faith was something that was there, but it wasn’t something I spent much time thinking about.

When I was in middle school, one of my best friends invited me to attend a local church’s youth group. The same friend and I had done Cub Scouts together, and I never really saw myself in Boy Scouts, so I was a little nervous. My friend eased me into it. He invited me to the once-a-month fun nights where we would play games, eat pizza, and generally be middle schoolers.

What I remember most wasn’t the message. It was the people.

It was a community that was accepting not because I showed up and prayed, but because I showed up and had fun.

That mattered.

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Over the last few weeks, I have been thinking intensely about The RILEY Project—how it grows, who we are as an organization, and what our future might look like.

Some of that reflection has come from conversations with mentors and people I deeply respect. Some of it has come from watching what is happening in Washington. And some of it has simply come from getting older.

At 26, I think I finally understand something that I could not articulate when I started The RILEY Project at 21.

When I was younger, I thought storytelling was the answer.

Now I think storytelling is the foundation.

That distinction has been sitting with me for a while because storytelling remains at the center of everything I care about. Stories create language. They create understanding. They help people feel seen. They turn shame into agency and isolation into connection. Every meaningful thing I have built through The RILEY Project has started with a story.

But lately, I have found myself asking a different question.

What happens after the story is told?

What happens after the conference ends? After the fundraiser is over? After the speaker leaves the stage and everyone goes home?

I’ve hosted enough events to know that one event does not change everything. One conference does not change everything. One support group, one workshop, one speaker series, one organization—none of them are enough on their own.

And yet they still matter.

In fact, I think they matter more than ever.

The reason they matter is because they are often where relationships begin. A parent finds a resource they didn’t know existed. A student hears someone describe an experience that sounds like their own. Two organizations discover they have been trying to solve the same problem from different directions. A teacher leaves with a new understanding. A partnership forms.

Most of those moments never make headlines.

But that is how infrastructure gets built.

One relationship at a time.

Part of what has pushed me to think this way is watching the conversations unfolding around disability policy and education. There is a lot of uncertainty right now. Questions about oversight, funding, accountability, and the future of systems that families rely on every day. Regardless of where those conversations ultimately land, they have reinforced something I keep coming back to: when systems feel fragile, our instinct is often to retreat into our corners.

Nonprofits protect their funding. Organizations protect their programs. Communities protect what they have built.

I understand the instinct.

But I am increasingly convinced it is the wrong response.

The disability rights movement was not built by a single organization. IDEA was not secured by one advocate. Section 504 was not won by one parent. The Americans with Disabilities Act was not the achievement of one leader. Progress happened because people built coalitions larger than themselves. They understood that the challenges they faced were too large and too interconnected to solve alone.

We can fragment systems all day long. We can separate education from mental health, assessment from treatment, self-advocacy from employment, schools from community organizations, and funding streams from outcomes.

But we cannot fragment the experience of a neurodivergent person.

Families do not experience life in silos.

A student who needs an assessment today may need self-advocacy skills tomorrow. They may need transition support in high school, accommodations in college, employment opportunities in adulthood, and community throughout their entire lives.

The systems are fragmented.

Their lives are not.

The more I think about that reality, the more I believe that the future of this work is not simply creating more programs. It is creating stronger connections between programs. It is helping people find one another. It is building shared language, shared goals, and shared responsibility.

If you’re a regular reader of The LD Viewpoint, you’ve probably noticed that there are a lot of invitations in these essays.

Invitations to grow. Invitations to gather. Invitations to rethink belonging. Invitations to build something better than the systems we’ve inherited.

Sometimes I wonder if those words sound repetitive. Or worse, like buzzwords.

Belonging. Community. Collaboration. Infrastructure.

I’ve been using them a lot lately.

But I keep coming back to them because I don’t see them as slogans. I see them as frameworks.

One of the ideas I have been exploring through The RILEY Project is that belonging is not a feeling. It is infrastructure. If that is true, then infrastructure has to be built. It requires spaces, relationships, partnerships, and opportunities for people to connect with one another. It requires people willing to convene conversations and create pathways where none existed before.

That is why I keep returning to collaboration.

Not because collaboration sounds good on a grant application.

Not because partnerships are fashionable.

Because supporting people with disabilities across the lifespan requires systems that talk to one another.

A true collaborative creates shared understanding, shared goals, and shared responsibility. It widens impact. It reduces barriers. It helps families find a hand to walk with them through systems that are often overwhelming and disconnected.

I have also been thinking a lot about accessibility lately. We often talk about accessibility as accommodations, compliance, technology, or policy. Those things matter. But accessibility is also about reducing friction. It is about making participation possible.

Barriers teach people to say no. Not because they want to, but because saying yes becomes exhausting. Every form, every referral, every waitlist, every disconnected system asks families to navigate one more obstacle before they can access support.

Accessibility does the opposite. It makes it easier to say yes. Yes to attending an event. Yes to asking for help. Yes to pursuing an assessment. Yes to advocating for yourself. Yes to joining a community. When systems become easier to navigate, participation increases. When participation increases, belonging becomes more possible.

Maybe that is the real invitation behind everything I have been writing about lately.

Not an invitation to support one organization.

Not an invitation to attend one conference.

Not an invitation to fund one project.

An invitation to build.

To think differently about how change happens. To ask what becomes possible when organizations collaborate rather than compete, when communities choose connection over isolation, and when we design systems with those on the margins in mind.

Because the goal is not to reinvent the wheel.

The goal is to rethink what it means to build together.

The challenges facing neurodivergent individuals, people with disabilities, and their families are too complex for any one organization to solve alone. The future will not be built by a single conference, a single program, or a single leader.

It will be built by people willing to see themselves as part of something larger.

Stories matter, and they always will. In many ways, they are where everything begins. Stories give people language for their experiences and help them understand that they are not alone.

But stories become movements when people gather around them.

And movements last when they build something together.

So often, I get asked about neurodivergent children and self-advocacy.

How did I become a self-advocate?

What skills were explicitly taught?

Was it public speaking? Was it learning disability law? Was it years of practice?

The truth is, if people knew how much anxiety I had growing up, they might ask a different question.

They might ask what made me feel safe enough to speak in the first place.

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Introduction

I’ve been thinking about how to grow my platform here, and I thought I should start by writing to the most loyal subscribers I have: my paid subscribers.

I am so grateful for all of you, and I thought I would try something different. These essays will be more personal—not focused on space or my nonprofit work, but on the culmination of how I got here.

I thought I would start with high school. Those who know me may wonder if I ever really left, but I wanted to write about the experience of writing a novel in high school and how a novel that didn’t represent my life somehow represented what it meant to be bruised, not broken.

For the time being, these essays will most likely remain behind the paywall. If you’re inclined to share this piece, there will be a preview available. That would be incredibly helpful as I continue to grow as a writer and build this community.

This series is meant to exist alongside my public-facing work on neurodiversity, education, storytelling, and systems change. These essays are more personal. They’re about the people, places, and experiences that shaped how I see the world.

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I am not sure people know this about me, but deep down, I am a research nerd.

Patterns and data interest me, but they also confuse me in the most productive way. I understand things best when I can see the trends, identify the frameworks, and start to see how the pieces connect. Sometimes that process is energizing. Other times it is exhausting. What I have come to understand, slowly, is that the exhaustion is not a sign that something is wrong. It is just how my brain works.

I am a dyslexic thinker. I see the world in systems and gaps — in the space between what exists and what should. I am not always great at the particulars. The line items, the compliance deadlines, the invoice that needed to go out on Friday. But show me a broken structure and I will find the fracture. Show me a fragmented system and I will start wondering what would happen if the pieces were rearranged. This is not a disclaimer. It is the orientation from which everything I have built has come.

I was 21 when I had the idea to start a nonprofit rooted in the needs of neurodivergent individuals. At its core, the idea was surprisingly simple: what if there were spaces where people not only felt safe, but belonged? What if students were seen not for who they weren’t, but for the strengths they possessed? What about the moment when the IEP or 504 Plan goes away — the transition into college, into life — when students suddenly find themselves navigating systems that were never designed with them in mind? All of it felt like a puzzle that needed a framework.

Or maybe it didn’t.

That uncertainty has followed me for years. I have spent countless hours thinking about Universal Design for Learning, social-emotional learning, emotional intelligence, and the broader question of what it actually means to create environments where people can thrive. I have built frameworks. I have read research. I have written about belonging as infrastructure more times than I can count. And still, I find myself returning to the same question: how do ideas become infrastructure?

The older I get, the more I realize that question is not entirely intellectual.

Here is the tension I have been sitting with: I built an organization for people who think differently, and I am still, quietly, fighting to justify how I think differently.

The research and the frameworks have not always been neutral pursuits. Some of them have been a defense. Some of them have been armor. If I could become the expert, perhaps nobody would notice how often I questioned whether I belonged in the room in the first place. The irony is not lost on me. The RILEY Project exists because I know what it feels like to be the person who has to work twice as hard to be seen as equally capable. It exists because I understand what happens when people internalize the idea that they are the problem, rather than recognizing that the systems around them were never designed for the way they think, learn, or move through the world. And yet I have spent years applying that same scrutiny to myself — questioning whether I was qualified enough, experienced enough, credible enough to lead the very organization I created.

As Brené Brown writes, true belonging does not require you to change who you are. It requires you to be who you are. I have spent a lot of time building a case for belonging and not enough time trusting my own.

So often I wonder if the problem is a negotiation with language itself — the way I look at the world through imperfect patterns, always chasing the end of fragmentation. Maybe that is what The RILEY Project has always been. Not a collection of programs or initiatives, but an attempt to connect things that were never meant to exist in isolation.

Students and families navigating disconnected systems.

Schools and communities working toward similar goals but rarely speaking the same language.

The distance between diagnosis and self-understanding.

The distance between support and self-advocacy.

The distance between individual stories and systemic change.

I have spent years describing belonging as infrastructure, and I mean that quite literally. Belonging is not a feeling we hope appears after everything else is in place. It is not a nicety. It is the structure itself. The storytelling events, the peer groups, the coalition work, the partnerships — these are not extras. They are what I have been researching since the beginning. Every conversation, every community gathering, every story shared has been another attempt to understand what belonging actually requires.

The work itself has become the study.

What I am finally ready to name is this: I cannot translate that study alone.

The RILEY Project has grown from an idea in a college dorm room into a real nonprofit with real programs and real community need behind it. The vision is clearer to me now than it was when I was 21. The challenge is no longer figuring out whether the work matters. The challenge is communicating it in ways that allow other people to carry it too — to funders who need to see a framework that is legible and executable, to partners who can step into the gaps and help build what I can see but cannot build alone.

For a long time, I thought the answer was a better strategic plan, a sharper explanation, one more framework. What I think now is that the answer is people.

The people who step into the gaps.

The people who see the vision and decide to build alongside it.

The people who bring strengths I do not have.

The people who transform what one person carries into something a community can sustain.

A movement cannot grow indefinitely on one person’s capacity. That is true of organizations, and it is also true of belonging itself. Belonging has always been relational. It has always required other people.

I am not stepping back from The RILEY Project. I am trying to step into it more fully. What that requires now is not another framework. It requires partnerships, funding, and a community willing to help translate vision into practice — so that the work I can see clearly in my head can actually live in the world.

What I am realizing is that the margins are not where the problem lives. The margins are where the information lives. They reveal what a system cannot yet accommodate, what it cannot yet see, and what it was never designed to hold.

Maybe this has been the translation problem all along. Not translating neurodivergent people to fit existing systems, but translating what becomes visible from the margins into something other people can help build. The vision was never about helping people adapt. It was about creating the conditions for a different kind of system altogether — one built around belonging rather than access to belonging.

That is the research I have been following since the beginning. I just needed to say it out loud.

And I can’t stop.

For the last five years, I have been trying to build an ecosystem. Not a program. Not a single organization with a clean theory of change and a measurable outcome on a grant report. An actual ecosystem — one where the nonprofits, schools, families, and community organizations serving neurodivergent people in the same zip codes start moving toward each other instead of around each other.

I can see it clearly. That has never been the problem.

The problem is that the structures I am working inside were not built for what I am trying to do.

Here is what I mean. The organizations doing this work are often serving the same families. Same kids. Same communities. And yet we file separate grant reports, attend separate convenings, protect separate territory inside a funding landscape that quietly rewards us for staying separate. Not because we want to compete. Because the system was built on scarcity, and scarcity teaches you to hold on.

Funders, with some exceptions, do not fund coordination. They fund programs. They fund measurable, attributable outcomes that can be assigned to a single organization and reported back cleanly. Collaboration — real collaboration, the kind that means shared decision-making and pooled resources and long-term infrastructure built across organizational lines — does not fit neatly into that model. So we translate. We take ecosystem thinking and squeeze it into program language. We describe coordination as if it were a deliverable. We make the collaborative work legible to systems that were never designed to see it.

And something gets lost in that translation every time.

That is part of what has felt so exhausting. Not the work itself. The constant pressure to tilt the vision just enough to fit the existing mold — until you look up one day and wonder if the thing you are building still looks like the thing you set out to make.

Gather is my clearest attempt to stop translating and just build the thing. A physical space designed around belonging as infrastructure. A place where organizations convene instead of compete. Where families do not have to navigate disconnected systems on their own. Where accessibility is the premise, not the accommodation. Where the question is not how do we fit neurodivergent people into existing environments, but what becomes possible when we design from them from the start.

It is a prototype. An ask. A bet that if you build the space, the ecosystem follows.

But I am building it as one person. A young founder with a vision that grows faster than the capacity to hold it. And the drive does not pause when the capacity runs out. That is the part I find hardest to explain. It just keeps going — past the funding gaps, past the exhaustion, past the moments where I wonder how many times you can ask people to believe in something before it fully exists.

So the question I keep sitting with — genuinely, not rhetorically — is how people sustain collaborative visions inside systems that keep incentivizing the opposite. How you hold an ecosystem together when the funding landscape was built to fragment it. How you keep building without slowly becoming something else.

I do not have a clean answer.

What I know is that collaboration is not a soft value. It is the structural alternative to a system that has been quietly dividing us. And accessibility created from the margins does not just benefit the people at the margins. It builds more human systems for everyone.

That belief is what keeps me building.

Even when the road is not finished.

Even when I am still trying to figure out how to build it.

I think about the college student fighting for his rights at a college that would eventually close. And sometimes I wonder why those memories stay so vivid, while other moments feel harder to access. I can remember the struggle clearly, but not always the first time I wrote something that felt meaningful. Not because a teacher told me it was good, but because I finally understood the assignment for myself. I wonder why I can remember the exhaustion so clearly, but not always the emergence.

Maybe that is part of what led me back to storytelling during COVID, when the ideas that would become The RILEY Project started taking shape. Or maybe it goes back even further than that, to being thirteen years old and sitting on a panel with Student Advisors for Special Education, listening to questions from the audience and realizing that stories could shift how people understood themselves. I still remember looking out at the audience and thinking about the younger students sitting there, especially the little girl who needed someone to remind her that she wasn’t stupid.

There isn’t a tight or tidy answer for why this work matters so much to me. But my best guess is that I have always been able to see patterns before they fully reveal themselves. I can see the gaps in systems and programs. I can imagine ideas before there is infrastructure to hold them. I can bring partnerships, conversations, and events to life in ways that help other people feel seen. And honestly, that has been one of the most meaningful lessons of my life: understanding that the things we create should ultimately benefit others.

But lately, the question I keep wrestling with is not whether the vision matters. It is how to create the foundation that allows the vision to survive.

So often, the vision itself scares me. Or at least the distance between the ideas and the execution does. There are moments where I worry burnout will arrive before funding does. There are so many ideas connected to The RILEY Project that showcase the breadth of what I believe is possible: storytelling initiatives, student groups, Gather, partnerships, collaborations, panels, a future story bank, physical spaces rooted in community and belonging. And sometimes I wonder how many times you can ask people to believe in something before it fully exists.

But what I know is this: even when I feel close to giving up, there is still a voice telling me that authentic storytelling and community for neurodivergent individuals matters deeply.

Because the child with an IEP eventually becomes an adult who either survives or thrives, and that difference is monumental.

And thriving, at least in my view, is not about overcoming neurodivergence. Neurodivergence is not a superpower. I did not overcome it. That framing has never sat right with me. Thriving is not about defeating who you are. It is about belonging. About existing in spaces where you are not constantly negotiating your worth or trying to shrink yourself into environments that were never designed with you in mind.

That is part of why Gather matters to me so much. Not just as a physical space, but as an idea. A place where storytelling, support, creativity, collaboration, and authentic community can exist together. A place where neurodivergent students and young adults do not have to spend all of their energy proving they deserve to be there.

Universal design teaches us something important: when we build with people with disabilities and neurodivergent individuals in mind, we do not just create better environments for a small group of people. We create more human environments for everyone. Accessibility and inclusion cannot simply be welcome mats and carefully worded mission statements. They have to become infrastructure.

And maybe that is the lesson I am still learning myself.

For a long time, I thought the challenge was figuring out how to carry the vision far enough on my own. But when I look back at the moments that mattered most — the storytelling events, the partnerships, the student panels, the collaborations, the conversations with families and educators — none of them happened alone. The work became real when people chose to build something together.

Maybe that is the real foundation of The RILEY Project. Not just ideas, but shared responsibility. Not just vision, but collaboration. Not competition, but community willing to help carry the work forward collectively.

I still believe there will one day be support groups for neurodivergent high school students. I still believe there will be a story bank. I still believe Gather will exist as a space that serves the broader community. I still believe there are people looking for the kind of belonging they have not yet found.

And maybe that belief, even when the path forward feels uncertain, is enough reason to keep building.

P.S. Writing this reminded me that The RILEY Project has never really been about one person. The moments that have mattered most have always come through collaboration, storytelling, and community. If you are someone who believes in this vision — or someone who has been looking for this kind of space yourself — I would love to connect.

We are continuing to collect stories from neurodivergent individuals, families, educators, and advocates as part of our growing story bank. If you would like to share your story, support the work, partner on future programming, or help us continue building toward Gather and other community initiatives, I hope you’ll reach out.

https://www.therileyproject.org/submit-your-story/

They are questioning what it means to be neurodivergent — to be seen, to be heard, to feel validated in an experience that the world has spent decades telling you to hide. The fitting-in economy holds these tensions as truth. That we should feel ashamed. That we should understand our neurodivergence as a deficit and not a strength. It follows the medical model — the one that focuses on fixing something — because when you are asked to fit in, you are asked to fix a part of yourself that was never broken.

The education system reflects this back to us in numbers that are hard to sit with. 72% of 4th graders with disabilities scored below basic on the 2024 NAEP reading assessment. For 8th graders with disabilities, 66% scored below basic. Both figures represent ongoing decline from already-low 2019 baselines. No state improved reading scores for students with disabilities at the 8th grade level. These are not numbers about broken children. They are numbers about a broken system — one that has never been adequately designed for how roughly one in five minds actually work.

And then we are surprised when those same students grow up and still feel like they are being asked to fit in before they are allowed to belong.

Here is where it gets strange. Because the same tension lives in the rise of agentic AI.

North American startups raised $252.6 billion in Q1 2026 — the largest quarterly total in venture history — with more than 87% going to AI-related companies. We are watching circular funding move at a speed that feels almost theological. And underneath it, a quiet assumption: that the goal of intelligence — artificial or human — is efficiency. Output. The elimination of friction.

I use AI every day. I want to say that clearly, because this is not a piece about being afraid of it.

AI is, in my life, a genuine equalizer. I spent years watching my thoughts outrun my ability to get them on the page. The gap between what I knew and what I could show was one of the most quietly painful parts of being dyslexic in a world that measures intelligence by what you can produce in writing, on deadline, without accommodation. AI helps me close that gap. It helps me line edit, move from the architecture of an idea to something others can read, feel confident about what I am representing.

But I spend hours going back and forth. Taking out phrases that don’t land. Pushing back when the output flattens something I’ve been building toward for years. The thinking is still mine. The vision is still mine. AI helps me show it.

That is not nothing. For a dyslexic writer, that is everything.

Vivienne Ming, a neuroscientist who has spent 30 years studying human and artificial intelligence, put it this way: “The goal of working with AI isn’t to get the answer faster. It’s to find out what you’re missing.”

That is exactly what I am doing when I go back and forth for hours, pulling out the phrases that don’t sound like me, pushing back when the output is confident but wrong. I am finding out what is missing. And I am the only one who can do that — because I am the only one who knows what the vision was supposed to be.

But the fear is real.

When AI is agreeable — when it confirms rather than challenges, when it fills the silence before you’ve had to sit in it — the skills that matter most begin to atrophy. Pattern recognition. Perspective-taking. The capacity to notice when something is off. Ming’s research found that the only human-AI teams that outperformed both humans and machines alone were the ones that pushed back. Who questioned confident outputs? Who brought their own judgment to the collaboration rather than outsourcing it.

That capacity — to push back, to recognize what the confident answer is missing — is exactly what neurodivergent communities have always had to develop to survive in systems not built for them.

It is also exactly what the fitting-in economy has spent decades telling us is a deficit.

And then there is the funding question. Which is, honestly, the one I have not figured out yet.

New tax incentives under the One Big Beautiful Bill are projected to generate $74 billion in small-donor giving — but those gains are likely to be outweighed by reduced incentives for high-income donors, leading to a net loss of around $6 billion in charitable contributions overall over the next decade. Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy projects the cap on itemized deductions will reduce charitable giving by $41–61 billion over the same period. Nonprofits are being asked to do more. With less. For communities that have the least access to major donors in the first place.

And somewhere inside all of that is the hardest version of the belonging versus fitting-in question I know how to ask: what does it cost to make your vision legible to the room?

The RILEY Project’s growth has been built on connections — on the work happening behind the scenes, on relationships that took years to build, on the slow accumulation of trust that the community actually requires. And sometimes that work is overshadowed by the absence of a firm product. Because the truth is, we are not fixing something broken. We are not launching a startup. We are not offering a tax deduction dressed up as a transformation.

We are building belonging from scratch.

And even when we invite people to share their stories — even when those stories land, when they shift something in the room, when someone leaves and says that was me, I needed that — that is not something a tax deduction, a venture round, or a deficit model can account for.

That is the paradox I am still sitting with.

Not because I don’t believe in the work. I believe in it more than in anything I have built.

But because the roadmap to funding community — real community, the kind that holds people before it asks anything of them — is one I am still drawing. And I am not sure the map for what we are trying to build exists yet.

Bryan Neider, who leads a $30 million disability services nonprofit, wrote something this week that I have been returning to: “Stewardship is the heartbeat of our mission. It is the bridge between a transaction and a shared legacy. When we move beyond the ask and focus on the relationship, we build a community that can weather any storm.”

I think that is the map. Not a product. Not a pitch deck. Not a program model that fits neatly into a funder’s existing framework.

A relationship. Built slowly. Held carefully. Returned to even when the ask is hard and the answer is not yet clear.

Which might be exactly the point.

Sources & References

Education & Assessment

National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). 2024 Reading Assessment, Grades 4 and 8. National Center for Education Statistics. nationsreportcard.gov

K-12 Dive. “What Does NAEP Show for Special Education Students?” February 2025. k12dive.com

Venture Capital & AI

PitchBook / NVCA. Q1 2026 Venture Monitor. North American venture capital data, Q1 2026.

Ming, Vivienne. “AI Is Cannibalizing Human Intelligence. Here’s How to Stop It.” The Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2026. wsj.com

Nonprofit Giving & Tax Policy

Fundraising Effectiveness Project. Q4 2025 Annual Fundraising Report. GivingTuesday and the Association of Fundraising Professionals. fepreports.org

Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, commissioned by Independent Sector. Projected impact of charitable deduction cap on giving, 2025. philanthropy.iupui.edu

Saunders, Laura. “Now That You’re Done With Your Taxes, Here’s What to Know for 2026.” The Wall Street Journal, April 17, 2026. wsj.com

Saunders, Laura. “How the Megabill Changes 2025 Tax Breaks for SALT and Charity.” The Wall Street Journal, November 28, 2025. wsj.com

BOK Financial. “8 Tax Changes Nonprofits Must Know Before 2026.” November 2026. thestatement.bokf.com

The Nonprofit Alliance. “Tax Reform & Charitable Giving: What It Means for Your Organization and Donors.” February 2026. tnpa.org

CharityWatch. “Tax Changes Impacting Your Charitable Giving Deductions Starting in 2026.” March 2026. blog.charitywatch.org

Giving USA. “Adapting to Charitable Tax Changes: What Nonprofits Need to Know for 2026 and Beyond.” November 2025. givingusa.org

Stewardship

Neider, Bryan. “Beyond the Ask: Donor Stewardship.” TEAMS! Newsletter, April 24, 2026. linkedin.com

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what it means to build inside that architecture. What it means to hold a vision that does not arrive in neat, sequential steps, and to translate it into something others can see and join. Because this is the question I keep getting from people who care about this work: when will The RILEY Project grow?

The honest answer is that I have enough ideas to execute for the next five years. The harder answer is that ideas are not the bottleneck. Translation is. Execution is. The real work is closing the gap between what I see clearly and what others can access.

Stories, as I understand them, were never meant to be neat. They do not arrive in order or come pre-packaged with context and resolution. They come in fragments, in feelings, in the moment you realize something that happened to you also happened to someone else—and that recognition changes everything. That is why storytelling at The RILEY Project is not a program. It is the infrastructure.

Our mission is to amplify neurodivergent voices and foster agency, belonging, and opportunity across the lifespan. That language is intentional. It does not say we tell stories about neurodivergent people; it says we amplify voices. The stories belong to the people living them, and our role is to create the conditions for them to be shared, heard, and honored. That distinction matters because too often these narratives are shaped by people outside the experience—researchers, clinicians, systems—describing something they did not live through.

What changes everything is recognition. When a dyslexic student hears an adult say, “I struggled with that too, and here is how I found my way,” something shifts. That kind of moment cannot be manufactured by a report or a policy. It can only be shared.

The way I move through the world is shaped by patterns. I see connections everywhere—between organizations, ideas, and people who are often positioned as separate or even in competition. But the literacy nonprofit across town, the self-advocacy curriculum, and the parent educator running workshops are not competing efforts. They are parts of the same ecosystem, and that ecosystem becomes fragile when those parts do not know each other.

This is why connection and partnership sit at the center of how I operate. Even storytelling is a form of partnership—between the person sharing, the audience receiving, and The RILEY Project as the vessel that holds it. None of those pieces works in isolation. I understand the structural reality that pushes nonprofits toward competition, but I have seen, again and again, that choosing collaboration produces something stronger than what any one organization could build alone.

What I am still learning, and what I want to be transparent about, is where the friction actually lives. I am seeing and writing faster than I can execute. The challenge is not vision—it is translation. I can map the full ecosystem clearly: how storytelling, community, Gather, education, and partnerships all connect. What takes longer is making that vision immediately legible to someone encountering it for the first time.

That is where growth happens, and that is where I am asking for help.

Growing The RILEY Project requires more stories, more community, and more resources—and those three things build on each other. More stories create more community. More community creates more visibility. More visibility creates the support we need to do more of all of it. If this work resonates with you, there are a few ways to be part of it: by sharing your story, by sharing this work with someone else, by supporting it financially, or by reaching out if you are building something adjacent.

The vision that has been living in my head the longest is something we call Gather. It is a community café, bookstore, and civic space designed around neurodivergent belonging. Not a clinical environment, and not a waiting room for services, but a place where someone can walk in, pick up a book, have a conversation, and feel—maybe for the first time in a public space—like they were expected. Like someone built it with them in mind.

The idea behind Gather reflects the same belief that underlies everything we do: narrative precedes belonging, and belonging precedes systems change. You cannot build equitable systems for communities that have not been given the space to know themselves and each other. Gather is that space, made physical.

The RILEY Project was founded on the belief that the people who have been most talked about deserve the most space to be heard. Neurodivergent voices are not a niche; they are a community. And communities need places to gather, archives to hold their stories, and infrastructure that was built with them, not just for them.

If you are neurodivergent, or the parent, sibling, or educator of someone who is, your story matters—not as data, and not as a case study, but as a story that is specific, complicated, and yours. We want to hold it, share it, and build the kind of archive that ensures the next person searching for understanding finds something real.

You can share your story at therileyproject.org/submit-your-story.

You can support the work at therileyproject.org/donate.

You can reach out directly at riley@therileyproject.org.

And if nothing else, share this with someone who needs to read it. That is still one of the oldest and most powerful forms of community building we have.

“Disability only becomes a tragedy for me when society fails to provide the things we need to lead our lives.” — Judith Heumann

There’s a feeling a neurodivergent high schooler gets when they’re transitioning to college. Suddenly, the conversation stops being about success. It becomes about access — navigating systems, decoding norms, figuring out how to get through the door before anyone asks what you might do once you’re inside.

I think about that feeling a lot. Because it doesn’t live only in college transitions. It lives in every environment that was not built with you in mind. And when systems are designed without you in mind, the margins don’t widen — they close in.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: access, success, agency, and belonging are not measures of the individual. They are indicators of the environment. When someone struggles to find their footing, we have a habit of locating the problem inside them — their diagnosis, their deficits, their inability to adapt. But the struggle is almost always telling us something about the space, not the person standing in it.

That realization changes what we’re building toward. Not just belonging in theory, but something more concrete — something that holds people. The kind of infrastructure where joy isn’t something you stumble into, but something that’s actually built.

But you cannot build that on top of an environment that asks people to fit in before it asks who they are.

Belonging cannot be manufactured. That’s the first tension. When an environment asks people to conform to norms that are already set — to earn a seat at the table by becoming someone the table already recognizes — that is not belonging. That is fitting in. And fitting in is a performance that costs something, every single time.

True belonging is something different. It’s building the environment itself differently. Radical inclusion — and I mean that word seriously. So radical as to accept all. To pour a hot or cold beverage. To host an event that creates a different viewpoint. To build a space where the people, not the norms, are shaping what the room becomes.

It should not be radical to offer an invitation to sit, to eat, to read, and to listen. But in a fragmented system, it is.

Which brings me to the second tension: when systems don’t talk to each other, fragmentation is the result. And fragmentation reproduces the exact feeling of that college transition.

Families are handed resources that don’t connect. Nonprofits are doing work that overlaps but rarely coordinates. Educators are left translating research on their own.

And the person at the center of it all — the student, the family — is left navigating a landscape that was never designed to be navigated.

The parent running from work, trying to understand why their child needs a 504 or an IEP, deserves more than a list of resources. They deserve real answers. Real connection. And maybe also a place to sit down, eat something, and breathe.

This is what competition does. It breeds fragmentation. And fragmentation makes access the goal, when it should be something much bigger.

When I step back, I keep returning to four things the Bay Area is missing — not separately, but as a coordinated whole:

Centralized, trusted guidance: a clear, credible hub that curates resources and cuts through the fragmented, often overwhelming landscape of support.

Translation of research into practice: turning complex learning science into practical, usable strategies for parents, educators, and students.

Spaces for connection and shared learning: ongoing, in-person opportunities that bring families, educators, and students together in meaningful ways.

Navigation and continuity across the ecosystem: support that helps people understand what to do next — connecting resources, relationships, and pathways over time.

When these things don’t exist together, the result is predictable. The conversation becomes about accessing the environment, not thriving inside it. Belonging becomes conditional. Agency becomes harder to hold. And joy — if it shows up at all — feels like something temporary, not something built into the system itself.

This is why Gather needs to exist.

Not to replace what already exists, but to connect it. To build the connective tissue between nonprofits, schools, families, and providers. To create a space where community is not an afterthought, but the architecture. Where belonging and agency are designed in, not bolted on.

To grow and to belong shouldn’t require superhuman effort. It should feel like coming home.

Because the environment should be asking: What do you need to thrive here?

Not: Can you find your way in?

“People are not disabled by their bodies; they are disabled by barriers in society.” — Michael Oliver

January’s Growing Into Ourselves event was the culmination of five years of planning. It was also a marking of joy in a community I have called home my whole life — the Bay Area. Those moments matter: listening to others’ experiences, drinking a cup of coffee from an establishment that hires people with disabilities, and donating to nonprofits that fund the gaps. All of it is part of building an ecosystem of joy.

To be neurodivergent should be to be joyful. But when systems are designed without you in mind, the margins don’t widen — they close in. And to be neurodivergent, quite frankly, is often to be exhausted. Gather is an attempt to flip that. So that the parent running from work, trying to understand why their child needs a 504 or an IEP, can get concrete support and real answers — and maybe also sit down, eat something, and breathe. To grow and to belong shouldn’t require superhuman effort. It should feel like coming home. That’s the difference between a space that plasters platitudes on the wall and one that actually builds joy — not as a concept, but as an infrastructure.

Gather came to me as an idea not to replicate what already exists, but to bridge the gaps through connection — linking resources that are already out there. Because partnerships are the cornerstone of community, and the table needs to be widened. Part of joy is creating a sense of stewardship — ensuring that supporters and like-minded people feel heard, and in some cases, guided in your mission. I have a business plan, a structure I believe in, and steps to see it through. What I need now is the community to help make it real.

Maybe it starts smaller than the full vision. Maybe it begins with an office space that can hold events, while I build out requests for proposals for different operators. But here is what I know: when I first set out writing about this idea, it felt completely out of reach. With the right partners — funders, collaborators, and community members who believe that joy is worth building — it can happen.

If that’s you, I’d love to hear from you. Reach out at riley@therileyproject.org.

It is this constant negotiation of language, this persistent feeling of inaction, that breeds both resilience and — so often — the solutions created by the very people who are oppressed. It is also the tension I live in every day, as someone who was directly served by the same high school where I now work, in the same community. And so often, my positionality is questioned — not directly, but through doubts about my abilities, my intellect. Sometimes it feels as though I am only touching the surface of my skillset, not out of arrogance, but because there is a sense of being trapped. What moments are reflected back to the people who have known me the longest — and how does that reflection land when I am posting, writing, speaking, and thinking through the issues we are all facing? Put more plainly: am I being taken seriously?

There is also this question of distance. I know that I am deeply attached to these ideas, to the formulations of thought I have been developing for years — but how to move beyond the idea stage, how to get more people not just to read my writing but to act and to give, still eludes me. I work with organizations on how to secure funding, how to craft a clear message, how to rally the support of funders — yet I struggle to apply that same strategic clarity to my own work. To galvanize for others while still feeling stalled in the concept phase, despite my best efforts across Gather, Voices of Strength, and so many other projects, is its own kind of invisible labor.

I have spent years learning how to help others tell their story clearly enough to be funded, supported, and sustained. I am still learning how to do that for myself. But I know what I am building, and I know why it matters. If you are an organization, a funder, or a collaborator who recognizes what is being built here — and wants to be part of making it real — I am not looking for charity. I am looking for partners. Across every iteration of The RILEY Project, that has always been the point. Reach out at riley@therileyproject.org.

Let that sink in for a moment.

I have dyslexia. I have always had dyslexia. And I have spent the better part of my adult life building spaces, writing essays, and showing up to panels — including one last night — arguing that the way our brains are wired is not the problem. The problem is the world we’re asked to fit into.

So when the most powerful person in the country uses disability as an insult, I feel it somewhere specific. Not in the abstract. In the place where shame used to live.

The comment was directed at Governor Gavin Newsom, who has spoken openly about his dyslexia for years. But the target was never really Newsom. The target was every child with a learning disability who was paying attention. The target was the one in five people in this country with dyslexia — the students, the families, the teachers, the advocates — everyone who has spent years trying to replace shame with self-understanding, and stigma with access.

I want to be clear before going further: this is not a partisan argument. I am not here to defend any political figure. What I am here to do is name what this moment costs — because oppressive language deployed from the highest office in the country doesn’t stay in Washington. It travels. It lands in classrooms and dinner table conversations and in the interior lives of young people who are still figuring out what they’re worth.

Last night was the second part of a panel I’ve been doing on my experience as someone with dyslexia, and one of the things I kept returning to is how early the shame starts. We are told — directly, indirectly, through a thousand small signals — to hide it. To mask. To fit in. The archive I’ve been building through this newsletter has been, in large part, a refusal of that. A sustained argument for agency and belonging, for designing from the margins, for building the kinds of spaces where all people can actually thrive.

There is no thriving in oppression.

The National Center for Learning Disabilities responded to the President’s comments with the clarity this moment demands. CEO Dr. Jackie Rodriguez said: “In fact, people with learning disabilities have risen to the upper echelon of every public office in the United States, including former Presidents. Leaders must uphold personal and professional standards of integrity, good judgment, and a commitment to public service. These are characteristics we should expect, and none of them are related to learning disabilities.”

She continued: “For decades, students with learning disabilities have been told, directly or indirectly, that they should lower their expectations about what they can achieve. Many people still do not disclose a learning disability due to fear of negative reactions, such as the ones made by the President today. They perpetuate the very same stigma that families, educators, and advocates have been working tirelessly to dismantle.”

Woodrow Wilson, the 28th president, is believed to have had dyslexia. He reportedly didn’t learn to read until he was nine. I think about that sometimes — not because it proves anything, but because it names something. The question has never been whether people with learning disabilities can lead. The question has always been whether the world around them will get out of the way.

Tomorrow night, Wednesday March 18th at 5:30 PM PT, Dr. Rodriguez joins the Neurodiversity Education Series — a series The RILEY Project co-presents — for a free virtual conversation: What Families Need to Know: Legal Changes & the Future of Special Education. She’ll outline what recent shifts in special education law mean for students and families, and what you can do right now. Simultaneous Spanish interpretation will be available. Register at jackierodriguez2026ndes.eventbrite.com. Given this week, I can’t think of a more important hour to show up for.

This is what the work looks like. Not just statements. Presence. Information that families can actually use.

Disability is not a dirty word. Neurodivergence is not a deficit. What makes life hard for people with learning disabilities and other invisible disabilities isn’t how our brains are wired — it’s society’s persistent failure to be accessible. The barriers are structural. The shame is taught.

And the brilliance? The brilliance was never in question.

You cannot oppress it, however hard they may try.

There were the usual panel questions, and then families began asking their own — about friendships, community, and what support actually looks like for their kids.

In the moment, I found myself talking about the feelings associated with my own diagnosis. The invisibility. The strange comfort that only comes from being a disabled person who has found their people. I talked about what it feels like to move through the world knowing, viscerally, that you are a puzzle piece society doesn’t quite know how to assemble.

I also talked more about my day job than The RILEY Project — not because I’m not proud of the work I’m building, but because explaining the connection between my work, the pilot I’m creating through Voices of Strength, and the long-term vision for Gather felt impossibly complicated in that moment.

Like if I tried to explain it all out loud, the puzzle might fall apart.

So instead, I return to the form that makes the most sense to me: writing.

What Voices of Strength Is

Voices of Strength is a pilot program rooted in the kind of community I experienced in high school — one centered on self-awareness and self-advocacy.

For a long time I described it as a support group. But I’ve started to think that language misses the point.

The real question is this:

How do we create spaces where neurodivergent high school students can have genuine leadership experiences?

Because the truth is that students with learning differences are rarely taught the most fundamental skill they’ll need for adulthood: how to advocate for themselves.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act technically requires schools to teach self-advocacy as part of transition planning. But the gap between what the law promises and what students actually receive is wide. Most students are expected to figure it out themselves.

And that expectation has a cost.

Many neurodivergent young people learn early that the safest way to move through school is to mask — to hide parts of themselves in order to appear typical. Psychologists understand masking as a survival strategy, but it’s also linked to higher rates of anxiety and depression, especially in adolescents.

In other words, we ask young people to perform normalcy before we’ve given them the language, tools, or community to understand their own minds.

Interrupting That Pattern

Voices of Strength is designed to interrupt that cycle.

The goals are straightforward:

• Help students feel confident discussing their diagnosis
• Give them tools to advocate for themselves in real situations
• Help them identify their own strengths and strategies

The first session begins with a simple question:

“Was there a moment last week where you wanted — or needed — to speak up?”

From there we move into case studies, role-play, and reflection. Students can participate however they choose — speaking, writing, drawing, or voice recording — because the curriculum itself is built on a simple idea:

There is no single correct way to communicate.

In the second session, students reflect on their relationship to diagnostic labels.

What comes up when you hear the word dyslexic or autistic?

Then we practice a deceptively simple sentence:

“I need ___ because it helps me ___.”

For many students, learning to say that out loud is transformative.

Why Community Matters

Even in peer communities, some facilitation matters. Not to control the conversation, but to help hold the space open.

The labor of being neurodivergent is real, and sometimes the pressure to have all the answers can become its own weight.

Research increasingly shows that when neurodivergent people interact with one another, something different happens. Rapport forms faster. Social bonds are stronger. And people feel genuinely understood in ways that are often missing in neurotypical spaces.

That kind of connection isn’t incidental.

It’s protective.

The Connection to Gather

This is also the heart of Gather — the community hub I’m building for neurodivergent adults and families in San Mateo County.

A single space that could hold a program like Voices of Strength, a parent group, a café, and a bookstore.

Scaled. Sustainable. Community-centered.

When neurodivergent people talk about what they want most from community spaces, three themes appear again and again:

Connectedness.
Awareness.
Empowerment.

Gather is designed to hold all three.

The Ask

So here’s the question.

Do you know a school that might want to host Voices of Strength as a pilot?

The model is intentionally simple. The RILEY Project provides the curriculum and customization for your student population. The school provides a small block of time — about 45 minutes to an hour — along with a teacher or counselor willing to facilitate.

We’ve also built a short pre- and post-survey so we can measure the program’s impact and demonstrate results to funders.

I’m also open to libraries, civic spaces, clinics, and nonprofit partners.

The barriers have always been the same: space, facilitation, and bandwidth.

But those are problems we can solve.

Why This Matters

Because when we gather, we empower.

When we convene, we shift the story — from disability as something to be fixed, to environments as something that can be redesigned.

That idea sits at the heart of the social model of disability. Many of the challenges neurodivergent students face come not from their neurology, but from systems that were never built with them in mind.

And systems can change.

Sometimes my ideas feel bigger than the current reality.

But belonging isn’t easy to build.

Neither is agency.
Neither is Gather.

And neither was anything else worth building.

If I’m being completely honest, it’s most of the time.

There are wins, though. Last weekend I spearheaded and organized a fundraiser for my work that brought together professionals, parents, and donors around one shared purpose: supporting a high school that serves neurodivergent students.

It was one of those nights where you could feel something larger than the event itself taking shape. A room full of people who believe deeply that students deserve better systems, better understanding, and better opportunities to flourish.

I also had the honor of recognizing a dear friend and leading expert in learning disabilities, Dr. Nicole Ofiesh, who has long reminded us of something simple but profound: students deserve the chance to thrive, not simply survive.

The evening also featured Dr. Denise Pope, whose research asks us to rethink how we define success in the first place. Pope often reminds educators and parents that what truly matters is whether students experience wellbeing, engagement, and belonging—not simply grades or admissions outcomes.

That idea stayed with me.

Because when we talk about fundraising, we often talk about dollars as if they are the outcome. But they’re not.

Funding is a means.

The real outcomes are the things Dr. Pope describes: wellbeing, engagement, and belonging.

And that’s where the tension lives for me.

The ideas I carry—for students, for parents, for professionals, for the entire community—aren’t just abstract thoughts in my head. They come from the gaps I feel every day. From patterns you start to notice when you spend enough time listening to families and students. From a tension that feels almost omnipresent in the systems meant to support them.

What I want isn’t just more events.

I want space.
I want funding.
I want safety.

But more than anything, I want community.

That’s the deeper reason behind Gather.

Not because I want to open a café.
Not because I want to run a bookstore.

Those things are simply vessels.

What I want is a place where belonging is the point—not the background. A place where students, parents, educators, and neighbors can sit at the same table and recognize themselves in one another. A place where conversations about learning differences, education, and advocacy can happen naturally rather than only in formal settings.

Because belonging rarely begins in institutions.

It begins in places.

And Gather is an attempt to create one of those places.

But Gather is only one piece of a larger idea.

Through The RILEY Project, I’ve also been developing a pilot program called Voices of Strength—a small advocacy circle designed to help students with learning differences better understand their diagnosis, reflect on their strengths, and practice self-advocacy in real-world situations.

The goal isn’t therapy or remediation.

It’s agency.

Students learning how to explain what helps them learn. Practicing how to ask for accommodations. Reflecting on moments when they needed support and building the confidence to speak up the next time.

In other words, helping students say, clearly and confidently:
This is how I learn, and this is what helps me succeed.

But programs like this only work when they are supported by something larger.

Across California, support for neurodivergent students and their families remains fragmented. Families often navigate disconnected resources. Schools struggle to access consistent training and expertise. Nonprofits do extraordinary work but frequently operate in isolation, competing for limited funding instead of building shared infrastructure.

So another part of the vision is broader: the creation of a California Neurodiversity and Mental Health Coalition, facilitated through The RILEY Project.

The idea is not to build another organization that duplicates what already exists.

It’s to connect what already exists.

To create a statewide network of schools, nonprofits, families, and companies that can share resources, fund collaborative programs, and elevate neurodivergent voices in education, philanthropy, and policy spaces.

But just as importantly, it’s about ensuring that funding decisions are grounded in lived experience.

Too often, systems are designed far away from the families they are meant to serve. If we’re serious about building systems that work, we have to start with the experiences of parents and students themselves—the people who understand the gaps most clearly.

That’s the ecosystem I keep imagining.

Events like Pathfinders help raise the funding.

Research like Denise Pope’s reminds us that the outcomes we care about are wellbeing, engagement, and belonging.

Programs like Voices of Strength help students build the confidence to advocate for themselves.

A coalition can help organizations collaborate rather than compete.

And places like Gather can give all of those ideas somewhere to live.

Because belonging doesn’t only happen on stages or at galas.

It happens in conversation.
In shared spaces.
In the quiet moments where people realize they are not alone.

Maybe that’s why my ideas sometimes feel faster than my execution.

I’m not just imagining projects.

I’m imagining environments where people can show up fully as themselves.

Where students are supported not just academically, but socially and emotionally.

Where parents can find one another.

Where organizations collaborate instead of competing.

Where belonging is something we design for—not something people have to fight to find.

Because if we can build those kinds of places and systems, something remarkable begins to happen.

The margins—the places where people have often felt overlooked—start to become something else entirely.

Not the edges.

But the very places where we meet.

And maybe even where we begin.

Anne Lamott has a line that has stayed with me longer than most — which is rare, because I think she is one of the greatest writers:
“All I ever wanted was to belong, to wear that hat of belonging.”

There is no metric for belonging that I know of. No assessment that can make you feel more whole. No evaluation that measures the strength of your spirit or the weight of your longing. And yet, so much of my early life felt measured.

In my academic career, that feeling was omnipresent — this navigation between strengths and deficits under a microscope for all to see. When I was five, I underwent an early educational assessment that raised serious concerns about whether I would develop typical reading and writing skills. I have built a life that contradicts those conclusions. And still, sometimes, I wonder if I am racing against them.

I was talking recently with someone who is also dyslexic. They described the self-doubt as feeling like they were always slipping back into the body of a second grader who couldn’t read — as if that version of themselves was waiting in the corner of every room. That image has stayed with me. That feeling that there is no sense of fitting in, let alone belonging.

We seek what we don’t have.

A version of this plays in my work. Social capital is both my strength and my exhaustion. The connections I make, the patterns I recognize — they allow me to help create spaces where others belong. But generating belonging is different from stepping into a community where you already feel like you belong. The first requires energy. Translation. Fundraising. Governance. Hope. The second allows you to exhale.

In disability communities, the phrase “Nothing about us without us” is essential. We should not be spoken about in rooms we cannot access. But there is another truth layered inside it. When people with disabilities are repeatedly asked to create the solutions, to design the systems, to educate the room — belonging can begin to feel like labor. It can feel like othering by exhaustion.

Being invited into the room is different than being asked to build the room.

And if you are always the one building, you rarely get to rest inside it.

This is why Gather seeks to exist.

Not as a performance of inclusion. Not as a fragile experiment. But as intentional infrastructure.

It is for the hurried parent looking for both solutions and a cup of caffeine. It is for the educator who learns more from a conversation held there than from a formal professional development session. It is the scone in the hand of a neurodivergent teen, iced coffee sweating beside them, sitting in a space that feels not provisional — but grounded.

Not fragile.
Not performative.
Intentional.

When I imagine it, I do not see myself disappearing into anonymity. I see myself as the founder who pulls up the chair to create the rest. But even that vision holds a question: Can I build the board, the funding, the shared hope required to leave once the chair is pulled up? Can I build something sturdy enough that it does not collapse without me?

Because true belonging is not just entry. It is endurance.

The five-year-old is still there.
The second grader is still there.

But so is gathering.

What if the true anchor of our memories is not the thoughts racing through our heads, but the distinction of time — the way we come to understand them with more grace? What if belonging is not confirmed by a score, but revealed through perspective? Through community that does not depend on our usefulness?

There may be no metric for belonging. No assessment that measures wholeness. But there is community. There is the slow work of building spaces where we are not translating ourselves into acceptability.

And maybe that is the hat we are all reaching for.

Not perfection.
Not proof.
But a chair already pulled up.