Start Here is an autism support video series for parents who have difficulty accessing behavior-analytic services for their children. The barriers include the cost of services, the shortage of specialists, distance, and more.
Each month we publish one short video, about five minutes, on a single topic that matters to families living with autism. The topics are listed on our website. The video is first made in English, and it has a simple activity a parent can practice at home. Our volunteers then prepare a version in every language we can reach, and each language has its own playlist on the ABA World YouTube channel.
For two weeks after each release, we invite parents to write their questions and comments underneath the video. We read all of them, and then we publish a follow-up video that answers them.
The strategies we teach are prepared for this project by a Board Certified Behavior Analyst, Loukia Tsami, based on the relevant behavior-analytic literature.
Eighteen videos are live in thirteen languages. Three languages on our list are still waiting for a first voice: Ibibio, Greek and Turkish, and we wish to identify volunteers for many more languages.
Four ways to help
1. Volunteer your language
Some of our volunteers work from the written script and correct it before recording. Others work only in speech, because their language is spoken far more widely than it is written, so they hear the English and say it in their own words. Both kinds of work are needed. Write to info@abaworld.org with your language and where you live.
2. Share the YouTube channel
Many of the families who need this have limited internet access, so the series reaches them through the people already standing beside them. Send it to schools, clinics, hospitals, churches and mosques, therapy centers, pediatricians, parent groups, and any organization that works with families living with autism.
3. Give to the project
Our goal is four thousand dollars. Two thousand goes toward internet and electricity for the volunteers who pay those costs themselves, and two thousand puts laptops in the hands of ten families who have none.
Twenty-five dollars covers a month of internet and electricity for one volunteer who pays for it herself.
Two hundred dollars buys a laptop for one family. We buy them in Nigeria, so the money goes further and a family has somewhere nearby to take it for repair.
Gifts to ABA World are tax-deductible in the United States.
Support Start Here
Every gift goes to the people recording these videos and the families watching them.
4. Donate a device
A working smartphone, tablet or laptop you no longer use reaches a family who has nothing to watch on. Ten devices reach ten families. If your organization is retiring equipment, we would be glad of it.
Devices come to ABA World in Houston, and I carry them to Nigeria myself on my next trip. Write to info@abaworld.org and we will send you the address. Before you send a device, please erase it and sign out of your accounts, so a family can set it up as their own.
Thank you.