Here at SACLC, we like to promote the idea of Autistic Acceptance as opposed to “autism awareness”, and naturally, as a dedicated Lions Club, we promote Autistic Acceptance year-round, not just in any particular month, compared to what we have done in the past.
Nevertheless, an opportunity for us to promote our club as well as promoting acceptance arose, and so today, we sent out our president Tom to windy Willoughby to accompany our dear friends at Community Flower Studio for their regular floral arrangement selling stall.
We decided to call our event “Ask an Autistic Day” mostly because we realised we had a unique selling proposition that no other Lions Clubs have — all of our members are autistic. We are in a unique position to educate the public on what it’s like to be autistic and the challenges and issues we face as autistic adults.
So we set ourselves up next to Community Flower Studio in front of Little Giant Roasters Cafe. We even put up posters and QR codes on the wall:
This wasn’t our first attempt at such an event. We actually tried to run a joint stall with Community Flower Studio back in November 2020 at Kirribilli Markets. It was, by and large, a failure, not least because it was 40 degrees Celsius that day and no-one was really in the mood to visit the markets. We still had fun and it was an unforgettable experience from which we have learned many lessons! It’s only because this event was somewhat more successful that we are even mentioning the failed “Kirribilli experiment”.
For one, we had decent foot traffic. This led to people putting donations into our donation box. We ended up receiving $60.15, which is certainly a respectable amount and all donations, however big or small, are appreciated 🙂
We also handed out leaflets on the topic of Autism and Mental Health, which we produced in-house and which you can read online right now. We hope to produce more informational leaflets on other topics in the future. We had plenty of these leaflets left over from Kirribilli. Crucially, they contain our contact details, so if you found our website from the leaflet we gave to you, do say hi 🙂
Finally, we spoke to quite a few people. Tom, however, is rather exhausted from standing up all day for six hours straight and is in need of a well-deserved rest!
All in all, the event was a success and we hope to continue this format on a regular basis, so look out for us when we come to your part of Sydney for your opportunity to Ask An Autistic!