Designing Canada’s first Mentorship and Peer Support Platform for Neurodivergent People

As high school students in 2017, Eliana, Peter and I didn’t know much about how the world works, but as a neurodivergent individual, being close to people who were neurodivergent or as immigrants ourselves, we realized the unjust barriers people with ND face, and want to help create a neuro-inclusive and just work environment and tackle systems-level change.

I remember having my interview at Chapters (a bookstore) for the Head of Finance position. For the remaining of high school, we pulled every connection we had and got ourselves into the basement of a church to host our weekly meetings.

Our organization lived on two principles: lived experience is expertise and nothing for us without us.

Initially as a non-profit, we aimed to empower neurodivergent people to pursue their passions and become leaders in their communities while helping organizations embrace inclusive hiring, create positive work cultures, and develop better work processes.

Speaking to hundreds of ND people across the globe, we found an opportunity to further our impact by connecting ND people who share the same lived experiences. As a neurodiverse team, we know that mentorship is most effective coming from people who gets it because they’ve gone through it.

‍Neurodiversity (ND) is an umbrella term that refers to the entire human range of cognitive diversity. Brains work and engage with the world differently, but some in more similar ways than others. We call them neurotypes, some neurotypes include Dyslexia, Autism, ADHD, and Neurotypicality.

ND∞Connect is a startup that evolved out of Viability, a non-profit I co-founded in 2017. We are a neurodiverse team working to co-create brighter futures by designing a mentorship platform that fosters a network for neurodivergent (ND) people and provides lived-experience-based mentorship that works.

Lived experience is expertise and embracing that and co-creating designs is a crucial skill as a designer. Over time, I unlearned my biases and co-created with my team an environment where our members could participate in ways that felt comfortable to them.

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My interview was held at Chapters, a chained book store in Toronto. I joined to help out as the position was relevant to the math and business degree at the time at the University of Waterloo.

Over the years, we saw an opportunity to scale beyond employment support. We held team meetings at the public library, recruited talented people in our circle, joined incubator programs. We pulled all-nighters to work on grant applications, held booths at community events and talked to a ton of people. We also took breaks to focus on our post-secondary / grad applications and internships. Some of us juggled all at once.

One of the many events where we got to talk to parents and caretakers about our mission.

We hosted ND social program, comedy show on Zoom, just to name a few.