Published on 12, July, 2020
I’ll make a poll for this later when I’m on my laptop. However the question I put to you is this. Should there exist local organisations in the major cities patterned like student unions but with the specific aim of serving autistic adults.
such organisations would:
notes:
I think acquiring buildings like that takes a lot of funding. What you need to do is start small groups in places like church halls or other cheap facilities, which you can build up and each member makes contributions to cover costs.
Things like this grow organically. It all starts with one person with a vision but it takes time and effort. If it's something that you want and believe in, then maybe you could be the one to take the first steps to get it going.
What you seem to be suggesting would be running a kind of reverse booking agency. Whereas the average booking agency would book a venue on your behalf and you would pay slightly more for the Service of having them make the booking arrangements for you The charitable booking agency would make a considerable loss by massively under charging you for the fees for the booking of the venue. I think doing things that way it would very soon end up being cheaper to just lease a building
I've got to say I never paid for membership of my student union while I was a member and membership of a club was something like 5-10£ for a year with most events being free, certainly the weekly ones hosted in SU venues were. So I'm not sure what you are talking about. You understand student unions are separate organisations from universities right? Universities do give them charitable grants but this is not a legal obligation. The student union isn't, directly, getting any tuition fees.
Glitter said:You can hire a community hall for 10 pound an hour. That's less than the price of a drink each if you get 4 people to join your club.
The cheapest I found was £43.50/h and that was a 20 person function room with out a bar. Maybe some village hall in outer suburbia or a village charges £10/h but If your community hall isn't in a city centre near good transport links its a bit of a non starter.
Some clubs try striking deals with bars near the university to run extra events in bars function rooms for free on the assumption that the students will buy lots of drinks. But you can't persuade a bar of that until you are an established club. And bars outside of student areas don't seem to offer these sorts of deals.
Glitter said:If you have a special interest club you'd like to do, there are plenty of places that you could set one up on the cheap.
Believe me I have looked, there is not. There is almost nothing I'd like to do more but all my attempts have failed. I'm sure there must be many other autistic people like myself who have tried and failed to set up clubs because they didn't have the support in place.
But all the students pay money to become members. So it's not exactly a free service. Plus the money that people pay for drinks etc goes towards the running costs.
You can hire a community hall for 10 pound an hour. That's less than the price of a drink each if you get 4 people to join your club.
I don't think a venue such as you describe would be a good use of tax payers money. It's just not efficient or cost effective. The problem is, I believe, not due to a lack of space, but more due to a lack of people willing to run the clubs. If you have a special interest club you'd like to do, there are plenty of places that you could set one up on the cheap.
The venue is the service. That’s why I specifically referred to student unions and the model they have for doing things. Yeah student unions have things like bars and advice and counselling services. But the one service that gets used more than any other is the venue itself. The fact that a student can set up a club and their fellow students can come and enjoy it with them. There is absolutely no way most student clubs could run without being given free room space by their student union. That is the service, the clubs are a service but they are also something that would only exists when the autistic people turn up and try to run them.
so the service is being able to go to your Union and say ‘I want to run a club’ and have them help you set it up and give you a space to do it. And the service is also for the lazier people or the busier people who don’t have time to run the club to be able to come and join a pre-existing club that somebody else has made.
whatever special interest you might have, be it my little pony, or Goth fashion, of the cultivation of succulent plants, in all probability there is nowhere you can go nearby to indulge in that special interest with other people who share it. But there could be. If there is an autistic union there is nothing to stop you booking a room for a pilot session and getting the union to spam all the other members of the union about the pilot for your new club. And then if enough people interested you can have your goth fashion / my little pony / succulent Fanclub.
and if your fan Club doesn’t work out somebody else’s will. And hopefully with enough people there will be enough variety for everyone to find some sort of special interest of theirs there is a club for that they can join in with.
Okay, now I'm very confused as to what you actually want to happen.
There really is no point in opening a specific venue if you don't already have the services to fill it with.
Example: you want to run a support group for autistic people to socialise. First get a few people together in a cheap venue (church halls are usually much cheaper than business or conference centres) and try it out to see how it works. Build up a community and then you have evidence to show how it works so that you can gain sponsorship.
While it may be nice to have a venue like you suggest, I think that it's not necessarily the space that people need most at this stage, it's available services and support. Helping autistic people get advice on employment, daily living, mental health, appropriate medical care, even something as simple as timely diagnostic services.
My point is that we need to be the change we want to see in the world. If something is missing, do what you can to help fill that gap.
The that’s a somewhat chicken or the egg argument. Student unions have universities to start them off. Working men’s club start when there is a large business nearby with lots of employees. Churches tend to start by meeting inside peoples homes. I’m not adverse to the idea of opening my own home up but I don’t actually have my own home and a lot of autistic people don’t.
The only thing to bring the autistic people together is the service you say you first have to bring people together to justify
Sorry, I seem to have misunderstood. I was thinking about a union as the people involved, not the building itself. My suggestion was to set up one of the groups or support services that you want to see and try to help it grow.
It's the people that get things like this going, not the buildings. All the groups you mention like student's union, working men's clubs, even the church started off with a few people somewhere small, and as their numbers grew they gathered more resources until they had enough to get their own facilities.