From Awareness to Justice: Why We’re Establishing the Neurodiversity Coalition of America
By Bridgette Hamstead
The neurodiversity movement in the United States has grown rapidly in recent decades, but it has remained fragmented, spread across organizations, projects, and advocacy efforts without a unified structure to carry it forward. Awareness campaigns have dominated public conversation, while systems of education, healthcare, housing, employment, and long-term care continue to fail neurodivergent people. What we need now is more than awareness. What we need is coordinated strategy, leadership, and infrastructure rooted in lived experience and justice.
That is why Fish in a Tree: Center for Neurodiversity Education, Advocacy, and Activism is establishing the Neurodiversity Coalition of America (NCA) as one of its major initiatives. This Coalition represents a concrete step in executing Fish in a Tree’s mission: to lay the practical foundations for neurodiversity justice in the U.S. and beyond.
The NCA is a newly formed national coalition of neurodivergent leaders, professionals, and advocates advancing the next era of neurodiversity justice. Led entirely by autistic, ADHD, AuDHD, dyslexic, and otherwise neurodivergent professionals, the Coalition exists to unite fragmented efforts, establish an annual national agenda, and elevate neurodivergent leadership across education, healthcare, employment, research, policy, and culture.
This is not a symbolic initiative. The NCA is movement infrastructure: an organizing body designed to shift the neurodiversity movement from fragmented awareness toward coordinated, unapologetic systems change. Its purpose is to bring the scattered threads of advocacy together into a coherent structure that can shape national priorities and hold the movement accountable to justice.
The goals of the Coalition are ambitious and concrete. Each year, the NCA will establish a National Neurodiversity Justice Agenda, a set of actionable priorities that guide the collective work of the movement. It will elevate neurodivergent professionals already leading in policy, education, healthcare, and employment, giving their work visibility and collective support. It will unify fragmented efforts by building bridges across silos and organizations to generate impact on a national scale. It will also create accountability structures, providing oversight, transparency, and shared standards for neurodiversity consulting, advocacy, and public leadership. And above all, it will advance systems change on the issues most pressing to our communities: housing, education, employment, healthcare inequity, institutionalization, and aging.
The Coalition’s unique positioning is clear. It is neurodivergent-led, chaired by myself and governed by a board of nationally recognized neurodivergent leaders. It is justice-oriented, explicitly grounded in neurodiversity justice and disability justice frameworks that center lived experience and collective power. It is coalition-based, functioning both as a convening force and an accountability structure for the broader U.S. neurodiversity movement. And it is movement-aligned, representing the next phase of advocacy: a shift away from vague awareness toward justice, equity, and structural change.
The NCA’s programs and initiatives reflect this role. Each year, it will convene national leaders to set the Neurodiversity Justice Agenda. It will partner with Fish in a Tree and aligned organizations to build education and workforce pipelines, including the Graduate Program in Neurodiversity Studies and the Board Certified Neurodiversity Consultant credential. It will coordinate advocacy campaigns on housing, employment, healthcare, and long-term care. It will establish ethical and professional standards for the neurodiversity consulting field, ensuring that this rapidly growing sector is accountable to justice and led by neurodivergent professionals. It will amplify thought leadership and community-led research, creating public visibility and movement memory.
The projected impact is transformative. With the NCA, the U.S. will finally have a unified, neurodivergent-led platform for neurodiversity justice. Advocacy will become more coordinated, less fragmented, and more powerful. Neurodivergent-led leadership will gain national visibility. Organizations and consultants will have shared standards and accountability. And the movement itself will gain long-term infrastructure for collective action rooted in lived experience, justice, and structural change.
Fish in a Tree is building the scaffolding for a new era of the neurodiversity movement. The Neurodiversity Coalition of America is a cornerstone of that effort. Together, we are laying the groundwork for sustainable, coordinated, and unapologetically justice-aligned systems change, for neurodivergent people in the U.S. and across the globe.