Nothing About Us Without Us
NeuroCyber is attempting in all of it's activities to ensure that neurodivergent people are representing themselves, guiding the conversations and actions taken by the network, and choosing our strategy.
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We have identified a number of neurodiversity issues where we want to give ourselves targets, to ensure that it's neurodivergent people driving our choices.
Language
We aim to stay up to date with the language that the neurodivergent community have chosen, adopted as their own and are advocating for others to use.
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We'll be asking all neurotypical contributors to use the language that the neurodivergent community is advocating for and to avoid using the terminology used by clinicians or ally-led advocacy groups if those terms are proliferating misconceptions about neurodiversity.
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In practice it means that we'd like all neurotypical people to get into the habit of researching the terms that neurodivergent people would like to apply to themselves, using them whenever practicable, and self-correcting without making any fuss when they catch themselves using common but potentially offensive terminology.
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This does not mean that we will police the language of our neurodivergent speakers and members - it's important that all neurodivergent people are allowed to discuss their identity as they choose - but that we ask our speakers to acknowledge that they are making that choice so that they are helping to create the space for others to feel safe to do the same.
Format
When developing content for our website, social media feeds or events we're attempting to provide it in ways that cater to as broad a neurodivergent audience as possible.
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We do our best to keep to the BDA's really helpful style guide;
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we aim to keep our content uncluttered and concise;
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we try to give information about our events and their location well in advance; and
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we are working on getting more website contributions in illustrative, audio or video formats.
Representation
NeuroCyber aims to maintain at least one third representation of neurodivergent people on our advisory board and to hold the charities and advocacy organisations that we engage with to the same standards.
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As we're advocating for neurdivergent people to be able to both freely explore their identities and choose how much they share, we welcome self-diagnosed individuals and do not require any of our members (including our board) to publicly disclose their potential differences.
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We also want neurodiversity to be represented at industry events and on diversity panels. Where possible, NeuroCyber does this by asking a neurodivergent person to represent us. Where that just doesn't work with people's availability, we have a policy of asking about representation in the rest of the panel or event - if a neurodiversity panel is going to be less than 50% populated by neurodivergent people then we will ask that the organisers engage more neurodivergent people instead.