CrimsonRise envisions a world where people with autism have the support they need in every sphere of life; and where autistic people come together with allies to create and sustain an inclusive and enriching environment for all.
Our mission is to serve autistic individuals with sensory, movement and communication differences by presuming competence and providing communication access and regulation support.
We strive to create a neurodiverse community where all individuals – neurodivergent and neurotypical – can benefit from opportunities for learning and personal growth, collaborative and mutually fulfilling relationships, and supports and processes that foster inclusion.
We believe in creating an environment that supports the sensory and motor processing needs of neurodiverse individuals. We seek the perspectives and counsel of those we serve so that they may learn in a setting designed to maximize their successes.
Practice, support and opportunities create growth. With these things, all learners can develop the capacity to grow and overcome challenges. We recognize and reinforce the efforts of our learners so that they may develop resilience and believe in their ability to succeed.
Everyone has the desire to live as independently as possible. Everyone desires friendship and to live in a community that fosters relationship building. We believe that with the right coaching and opportunities, our learners will achieve these goals. We offer group learning opportunities that encourage personal growth and foster peer-to-peer relationships in a flexible setting.
The ability to communicate is a fundamental human right; it should be accessible to all people– including those from the nonspeaking, minimally speaking and unreliably speaking populations. We strive to provide access to communication methods that allow these individuals to express themselves in a way that is optimal for them.
We, the autistic co-founders, have worked very hard to accept our identity as autistics, and on our motor sensory differences to become fluent spellers. We want every nonspeaker to have spelling to communicate access like we do. In 2021 we approached our allies and asked them to cofound an organization that would make communication access possible for many like us.
We led the branding and logo creation for our organization. We wanted to found an organization that is of very high standing in everything we do. When reviewing the curriculum for our Studio program, we discovered that Harvard University has the oldest daily college newspaper in the US, known as The Crimson. We liked having an association with that name. We know that we are rising. That the future for nonspeakers is rising and will be even better than ours. From this came our name CrimsonRise.
When we came to design the visual representation of our organization, we did not want to show rising as a continuous linear upward movement. We experience rising differently. This is what our logo represents. We rise, gain control over our bodies and regulation. We lose it, and we experience loss and trauma. We pause. And then we rise again, sometimes lower than before, but we rise again. This is represented by the way the rays appear in our logo.. They are not all equal in length and there are gaps between them.
