Acceptance Isn’t Enough
What Autism Acceptance Month should actually require of our community
By Drew Walker, Executive Director
Originally published on Medium: https://medium.com/@dwalk36/a38c34264380
April is Autism Acceptance Month.
Not Autism Awareness Month — that’s the old name, and the shift matters. Awareness means you know autism exists. Acceptance means you’ve actually made room for autistic people in your community, your workplace, your healthcare system, your city.
Those are very different things.
Baton Rouge is reasonably good at awareness. We have providers who know what autism is. We have schools with special education programs. We have a community that, broadly, understands that neurodivergent individuals exist and deserve support.
What we are not yet good at is acceptance — if we measure acceptance not by sentiment but by infrastructure. By whether this community is actually built for autistic adults to live full lives in.
Meet Jordan.
Jordan is twenty-six years old. He was diagnosed at five, spent thirteen years in the special education system, and aged out at twenty-one with an IEP that listed employment and independent living as goals. That was five years ago.
He is still waiting for his NOW waiver — the Medicaid program that would fund the supported employment and independent living services his IEP promised were coming. He has been on the waiting list for four years.
He works part-time at a job he found himself, without a job coach, without workplace accommodations that were ever formally discussed, and without any of the structured onboarding support that research shows dramatically improves retention for autistic employees. He is good at his job. His employer largely doesn’t know what to do with him. He has not been promoted.
He lives with his parents because the supported living options he would need to live independently are accessed through the same waiver he’s still waiting for. His parents are in their sixties.
Jordan doesn’t think of himself as falling through the cracks. He thinks of himself as figuring it out. But he is exhausted by the figuring — by the gap between what the system said would be there and what actually is.
Jordan is not an exceptional case. Jordan is what happens after Marcus.
In our last issue, I introduced Marcus — a seventeen-year-old in East Baton Rouge Parish, two years from aging out of the school system, watching the transition cliff approach. I wrote about the terror his parents feel about what comes next.
Jordan is what comes next.
And the truth is: our community has been far better at talking about children like Marcus than adults like Jordan. The advocacy, the fundraising, the public awareness — it concentrates overwhelmingly on children. Autistic adults are the largest and least-served segment of the population we claim to be building for.
This is the gap Autism Acceptance Month should compel us to address. Not with blue lights and awareness campaigns. With honest accounting of whether this community is actually functional for autistic adults.
It largely isn’t. Here’s the evidence.
Employment.
Eighty percent of autistic adults are unemployed or underemployed nationally. In Baton Rouge, we have LSU, major healthcare systems, state government, and one of the largest petrochemical industries in the country — employers who actively say they want diverse, skilled workforces. Neurodivergent adults are that workforce. The connection is not being made, because what infrastructure does exist is not sufficient or sufficiently coordinated.
What Jordan needed when he left school: an employer who knew how to recruit him, a structured onboarding process designed with his needs in mind, a job coach funded to support his first year, and a workplace culture that treated neurodivergent employees as an asset rather than an accommodation problem. None of those things existed. He improvised. Many people in his situation don’t make it as far as he has.
Healthcare.
There is no adult autism clinic in Baton Rouge. There are excellent pediatric developmental specialists — but their patients age out at eighteen or twenty-one, transitioning to primary care providers who often have little training in working with autistic adults. The sensory accommodations, communication preferences, and co-occurring conditions that Jordan’s pediatric team understood have to be explained, from scratch, to every new provider he sees. He has stopped seeing some providers because the process of explanation is more exhausting than the condition he was being treated for.
This is not a complaint about individual providers. It is a system design failure. A community that is serious about autism acceptance trains its healthcare system to serve autistic adults, not just autistic children.
Housing.
Jordan lives with his parents because the alternatives require the waiver he doesn’t have. This is not a personal failing. It is the predictable outcome of a supported living system so underfunded that one in three direct care workers leaves the field every year. The Medicaid waiver system in Louisiana needs $165 million more per year to function at adequate rates — a gap documented in the state’s own rate study. That gap is why Jordan is on a four-year waiting list. That gap is why his parents, in their sixties, are still providing the support the state promised to fund.
Here is what Autism Acceptance Month should actually require.
It should require employers in this community to ask honestly: do we know how to hire autistic people? Do our interview processes screen them out before we ever see their work? Do we have the onboarding infrastructure to retain them?
It should require healthcare systems to ask: are our providers trained to work with autistic adults? Do our clinical environments — the lighting, the waiting rooms, the communication styles — actively exclude neurodivergent patients?
It should require policymakers to ask: how many people in our state are waiting years for services they were promised? What is the human cost of a $165 million annual funding gap?
And it should require the Capital Area Autism Network to ask: are we building for Jordan, not just for Marcus?
The answer, honestly, is that we are not there yet. Our evidence base is stronger on the school-age population. Our relationships are deeper with pediatric providers than with adult services. Our first State of Neurodiversity report — publishing October 2026 — will document the adult autism landscape as clearly as we can, but we know the gaps in our own knowledge.
This is why I’m asking, directly, for something different in this issue.
If you are an autistic adult in the Capital Area — if you are Jordan, or if you know Jordan — I want to hear from you. Not to speak on your behalf. To understand what this community actually looks like from where you stand. What works. What doesn’t. What a community that is genuinely built for autistic adults would need to have in it.
Your experience is not a data point. It is the evidence that makes the data mean something.
Acceptance is not a feeling. It is a set of choices a community makes about who it builds for.
Baton Rouge has the awareness. We are working on the infrastructure for the acceptance.
That work starts with listening to the people this community has, for too long, talked about instead of talking with.