The School of Public Health will host a special Town Hall meeting on Friday, November 13, 2009 to focus on the unique needs of adults with autism. The conference, which will be held at the Paul Peck Center, is one of 16 similar town hall meetings that are being organized by a national consortium around the country that day.
The town hall meetings are being organized by Advancing Futures for Adults with Autism (AFAA), a consortium of leading autism advocacy organizations and service providers focused on addressing the increasing and unmet demand for effective services for adolescents and adults with autism, with the goal of developing an actionable national policy agenda for life-long living and learning with autism.
At each site, working groups – including adults with autism, family members, community members, neighbors, employers, service providers, representatives of funding and support agencies, elected officials and others – will seek to establish priorities for meeting the needs of adults with autism in several key areas, including employment, housing, safety, recreation, transportation and social opportunities. The Town Hall will be organized from a central Chicago Town Hall hub, with more than one thousand participants across the country linked via live webcast.
Philadelphia is one of the satellite sites and will host 50 participants. Proposals developed during the course of the day-long session will be voted on electronically by all participants to develop a focused agenda for change.
“There is a tidal wave of children with autism who will become adults during the next decade and our society has yet to address how the need for services, jobs, housing and other opportunities to lead fulfilling and productive lives will be met,” said Peter Bell, AFAA co-chair and executive vice president of Autism Speaks. “These aren’t challenges we can keep putting off. The need for action is real and urgent, and the Town Hall is a critical step in developing an agenda that can ultimately be realized through legislation and other means of effecting change.”
“The time is now to consolidate and focus our efforts to significantly improve the quality of life available to adults with autism,” said Ilene Lainer, AFAA co-chair and executive director of the New York Center for Autism. “As a society, we have an obligation to secure a brighter future for individuals with autism spectrum disorders. By taking action now, we can ensure that adults with autism break free of the all-too-common status of dependency and become engaged, involved and ideally, tax-paying, members of their communities.”
The prevalence of autism in the United States has increased tenfold in the last decade, from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 150. The School of Public Health is leading the national Early Autism Risk Longitudinal Investigation (EARLI) Study. EARLI is a network of research sites that will enroll and follow 1,200 mothers of children with autism at the start of another pregnancy and document the newborn child’s development through three years of age. The EARLI Study will examine possible environmental risk factors for autism and study whether there is any interplay between environmental factors and genetic susceptibility. Dr. Craig Newschaffer is the study's primary investigator.
For information about the AFAA National Town Hall, please visit www.afaa-us.org.