These neurodivergent students are helping each other build more inclusive schools

DENVER — Engineering student Tory Ridgeway buried his head.

Just finished with his Lockheed Martin internship and weeks away from his final year at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, the 22-year-old from Maryland found himself overwhelmed by the solidarity he felt at a neurodivergent leadership conference.

Having autism and ADHD, Ridgeway already knew there were plenty of others like him. But he hadn’t realized they shared the same negative self-talk. He said he locked into focus when he heard The Neurodiversity Alliance President Jesse Sanchez describe overcoming feelings of being a “defective toy.”

“They talking to me,” Ridgeway said. “I felt seen. I felt heard. And I’m gonna try to recreate this feeling wherever I go now.”

A peer-to-peer movement of high school and college students is hitting campuses this fall to foster that same sense of liberation among their fellow neurodivergent classmates, whose brains function differently from what is considered typical. Known as The Neurodiversity Alliance, they’ve increased the number of schools reached from 60 to more than 600 in the past year.

Building on the visibility that followed rising diagnoses and pandemic-era awareness, the alliance says it empowers youth to build more inclusive spaces together. In early August, more than 130 students took up that mantle at a Denver summit. They exchanged recruitment tactics, asked professionals about navigating “neurotypical” work cultures and named their favorite neurodiverse fictional characters. Throughout the week’s sessions, many stimmed — making repetitive movements to self-soothe — by building LEGO blocks, braiding yarn or using fidgets.

David Flink, who 27 years ago co-founded what is now The Neurodiversity Alliance as a Brown University student, called them “ambassadors of the possible.” Their ranks encompass many distinct learning and developmental differences such as autism, ADHD and dyslexia. Yet they are united by the shared experience of “masking,” or hiding traits to gain acceptance in environments designed without them in mind.

“We hear all the time how much we can’t talk to each other across difference,” Flink said. “When I go to visit one of our clubs, I see the opposite. And it’s because of love and curiosity.”

It often starts in the Art Room.

That’s the name for wherever high school mentors meet with middle schoolers to reframe their cognitive differences through crafts. This program, called Eye to Eye,…