Covering ground

It matters to be an independent group that runs itself, not tied to any council funding nor run by the big charities. It matters because to be a genuine voice in what you say. But there is a very clear top reason why it matters, which Elas is living now. It means we are free to have no territorial boundary.

Elas has been the core of making a string of successful meet-ups happen all round the Central Belt, as recently at Perth and Paisley. In them we have put face to face reality to personal links made beyond our own region, in 2 ways.

• So that aspies within reach of us have joined us, who have no similarly independent group running in their localities: our filling of that void has been right and made a needed practical difference in several cases.
• Or, so that folks in those places where a new venture can start up cautiously, that is independent like us, can use us as a reference point and a friendly link to meet up with and share with. Supporting the free aspie scene to take root in new ground.

We can do this because nobody's office is in a controlling place to tell us to only serve folks inside a defined boundary line. Number 6 and its Glasgow counterpart the Arc have not been allowed to succeed in the same way, as what would be a good part of their service. By their state funding to serve particular councils or health regions, they have been tied into functioning only inside territorial boundaries. Of NHS Lothian's region, or of the terribly arbitrary Glasgow city boundary that is smaller than the physically real city and is often just flung between 2 houses in long streets of unbroken habitation, causing division and exclusion and pain as we have heard when visiting the West. The autism strategy is now to extend Number 6 type services to everywhere, but presumably they will still each be little islands whose users are separated from each other by boundary lines. It still won't be a cross-regional scene for folks in places of well developed service to help out folks in places of rudimentary service. But aspies organised independently to meet up can be that.

Now we hear of a new group in Stirling with the council paying Scottish Autism to run it. This arrangement again ties it to only serve the territorial boundary of Stirling, We have seen this result in exclusion from that local scene, in time of need, be experienced when resident in an adjoining council area, clearly inside the radius of having Stirling as a focal place. Incredibly ironic of SA to accept deals like this to run groups, when its own head office is in Alloa, one of the places this group is barred from serving.

In common sense care for the participants, SA should want this arrangement to be as temporary as possible. The folks in Stirling need their group to evolve to the model of running independently same as us, and as Argh in the Highlands. So that it can include folks' friends in Alloa and all the places around there regardless of what council they are in, and so it can make the same non-local links as us, maybe including with us, and be part of the growth of a speaking out scene that covers everywhere. Local groups don't need funding to exist, members just need to agree a place to meet up that does not involve expensive room booking and they are all comfortable with. Local groups by contact and meet-ups, and by folks crossing region to belong to whichever group they feel best in, helping each other to make the scene cover everywhere, is the vision. We are already starting to make this happen. It also protects our freedom everywhere to speak on problems with services and to have blogs like this, when what we want to say goes well beyond what the big charities want to say.

Remember another way these links massively importantly protect our free voice, and indeed our personal links and friendships. By our links with each other in different places we will all safeguard each other against getting trapped by any authoritarian takeover in any group, like the cautionary horror story of what happened to a group in a region adjoining us, that was run by a bigger society whose committee suddenly passed Orwellian cult-like rules misusing data protection to ban members from speaking freely to each other, before they had even had the chance to consent to this being put in place, so that it interfered in communication between friends and cut folks off from each other. A sinister story I told here a year ago, it is time to remind ourselves of it. In fact the group concerned has remained suspended from meeting ever since then, supposedly temporarily, which is now a farce. It is a clearly failed and destructive outcome to how to run a group. Compare that with the success of the total opposite model, the free model, ours.

The folks who were in that group, now unjustly adrift without an aspie scene, or who have been in any type of controlled group, have a need to find the scene all over again, but our free scene of independent groups that all support each other's members in keeping it the free scene.

Maurice Frank