Adults at work get affinity groups. They get Employee Resource Groups, chat channels, and networks built around shared identity and shared experience. Companies fund them, executives sponsor them, and the business press calls them strategy.
Students get a social skills group.
We have said this before, and it is worth saying again:
Kids at school need the same thing. They need identity, community, and voice. Kids should be treated at least as well as adults on creative teams. They should have the psychological safety afforded creatives. Kids are nucleation sites of creation when we provide them psychological safety and welcoming communities who understand their lived experience—and then get out of the way.
Communication is oxygen. Provide the atmosphere, connect communities, let affinity groups and self-organizing teams develop, and watch students thrive and create.
This page is the practical follow-through on that claim. It is for the educator, staff member, or school team starting a Neurodivergent affinity group and wondering where to begin.
You do not have to invent this. Most of it already exists, built by Neurodivergent people, and it is free.
Table of contents
- Start with the toolkit that already exists
- Get NEST from NEST
- Student-led is the design, not the destination
- Let the group be multiage
- Build the room before you invite anyone into it
- Activities that build momentum
- Cavendish Cards
- Penguin Pebbling
- The Map of Monotropic Experiences
- Star Stuff
- Allies belong here, and the group is still by and for us
- Finding local partners
- Use the filter first
- Real on-ramps
- Send us what you find
- Further reading
Start with the toolkit that already exists
The single best starting point is not ours.
NEST — the NEurodivergent peer Support Toolkit is a free, complete kit for setting up a peer support group for Neurodivergent young people in mainstream secondary schools. It was built by researchers at the University of Edinburgh together with Neurodivergent young people and a Neurodiverse group of adults, and piloted in four schools before it was published.
The creation of this toolkit was driven by a desire to make spaces in school for neurodivergent students to be together: to be able to comfortably be their authentic selves and not have to change their behaviour or hide who they are to fit in with a neurotypical majority.
— Dr Catherine Crompton, NEST Principal Investigator
The kit is not a pamphlet. It includes the handbook, planned session outlines with preparation and wellbeing notes for each activity, book club recommendations, board game and role-playing game recommendations, posters for staff and for parents, slides for announcing a new group, and a summary of the education policy context.
Its ethos rests on four concepts, which we also quote on our Alternatives to ABA page:
- Inclusivity. The NEST group is a club for all neurodivergent young people, whether they have a formal diagnosis or not. NEST groups should also be thinking about other forms of inclusivity – for example making sure that any students who might feel marginalised in other ways (e.g. being from a minority ethnicity or sexuality group, or having a physical disability) are welcomed to the group.
- Belonging. Peer support allows neurodivergent young people to support each other through their shared understanding.
- Acceptance. When people feel accepted, they can relax, be frank about their troubles without fear of judgement, and enjoy themselves.
- Advocacy. Getting support from other people can help make sure neurodivergent young people’s voices are heard on issues that are important to them.
The premise underneath all four is worth stating plainly, because so much school-based provision assumes the opposite: Neurodivergent students are the experts on their own experience. Peer support works because of that expertise, not in spite of it.
Get NEST from NEST
Download it from the NEST project page. Please do not pass around copies you got somewhere else.
NEST is published under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. You may freely print and photocopy the materials for your own group, and you may adapt them for use in your own classroom. You may not host copies, redistribute them, or share adapted versions with other schools. Link people to the source instead — it keeps the project visible, and it means the next person gets the current version.
Cite it as: Crompton, C.J., Fotheringham, F., Webber, C., Cebula, K., Foley, S. & Fletcher-Watson, S. (2024) The NEurodivergent peer Support Toolkit (NEST). University of Edinburgh.
Student-led is the design, not the destination
A group does not become student-led at the end, once the adults have got it running properly. It is built that way from the first meeting, or it tends not to get there at all.
NEST is direct about what the students decide:
A very important aspect of NEST groups is that they are student-led. This means that students should have a say in important decisions, including the time and location of the group, ground rules and codes of conduct for members, and the types of activities that take place.
And equally direct about what that does not mean:
This doesn’t mean that the group should have no structure, that there are no rules, or that students should be expected to make all the decisions about the group and its activities. It is the role of the staff facilitator to make sure that students feel the group is a safe space for them to explore their ideas and interests and that they have regular opportunities to have input.
Handing students a blank page is not autonomy. It is an unscaffolded demand, and for a lot of us it lands as a wall. Offer three options to choose between. Offer a decision that already has a shape. Structure is not the opposite of self-determination — arbitrary structure is.
And not every student wants to lead. NEST flags this explicitly, and it matters:
It’s also important to acknowledge that not all students will want to be involved in leadership, they might just want to come along to the group without being involved in decision making.
A group where showing up is enough is a group people can actually show up to. Leadership should be one of several ways to belong, never the price of admission. Some students will run sessions. Some will liaise with school leadership about access. Some will design the logo. Some will sit at the edge with headphones on and say nothing for a term, and that is a full and complete way to be a member.
Let the group be multiage
High schools sort people by manufacture date. Your group does not have to.
The reflex is to run a ninth grade group, or to split the meeting by grade band because that is how the timetable thinks. Resist it. Multiage grouping is one of our foundational commitments, and it is not sentimentality — it is the thing that makes a small group work.
We lose so much when we divide students by age… We lose peer mentoring, we lose the aspirations to be “like the big kids,” we lose the ability of younger kids to become leaders, and we lose the ability to let kids grow at their own rate. We also lose the shared public space which lies at the heart of community, culture, and democracy.
— SpeEdChange: The Multiage Magic, quoted in Multiage
In a Neurodivergent affinity group specifically, the age spread is doing load-bearing work. A senior who has already survived three years of the building is the most credible person in the room to a frightened ninth grader — more credible than you, and that is fine. Mentorship appears without anyone scheduling it. The students who will not speak in front of peers their own age will sometimes talk to someone older. And leadership roles distribute naturally, because the seniors age out and somebody has to pick it up.
It also solves a practical problem. A single-grade Neurodivergent group in an average high school might be four people, three of whom are absent on any given Thursday. Across four grades, it is a room.
Build the room before you invite anyone into it
A group meets somewhere. The somewhere is part of the outcome.
In a neurodiversity-inclusive environment, inclusion is not a sentiment — it’s design.
Before the first meeting, walk the space you have been given and ask what it demands of a nervous system. Overhead fluorescents, a door onto a loud corridor, no way to leave without crossing in front of everyone, nowhere to sit that is not a circle of chairs facing inward — these are design decisions, and they will shape who comes back.
Three things we publish that help:
- Create a Neurodiversity Inclusive Environment — the practical guide to reducing sensory load, lowering performance pressure, increasing predictability, and respecting autonomy in a real room.
- Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes — a room needs somewhere to be alone, somewhere to gather, and somewhere to bump into people. A single mode of space serves a single mode of person. See also Cavendish Space.
- Interaction Badges — green, yellow, and red badges that say whether someone wants to be approached. Printable, usable on day one, and they let people state a boundary without having to perform an explanation. This is one of the cheapest access wins available to a new group.
If you are meeting off-site, our Access Survey walks a venue.
Activities that build momentum
NEST ships its own session outlines, and they are good — designing a group flag or logo, board games, book club, each with preparation notes and wellbeing considerations. Start there.
These are ours, and they are free to print and use. Every one of them is low-demand, has no scoring, and does not require anyone to read aloud or explain themselves.
Cavendish Cards
cavendish.space — a card deck for naming sensory and niche construction needs by pointing at a picture. No reading needed. No points, no matching, no winning. Turning a card face-up is the person choosing to share it — nobody turns another person’s cards over. Free, printable, and released CC0.
Four of its ways to play fit a school affinity group particularly well:
- Class weather — everyone lays one weather card face-up. The room’s weather becomes visible. No one is named, nothing is scored, and it takes two minutes. This is the best opening ritual we know for a group whose members do not know each other yet.
- Map the edges — written for older learners. Lay the day out left to right and find its hard crossings — focus to talking, rest to joining in, home to out the door. On each edge that bites, lay a lily pad. You are not mapping what is wrong with a person. You are padding the crossings so the day fits.
- Build a niche — lay the cards that would make a space fit you, with the habitat card at the centre. The result is a design brief for your room, written by the people in it. This is the student-led pivot with an artifact at the end of it.
- Play as the environment — this one is staff training, not a student session. Deal a table of needs that genuinely conflict — room to move against less talking — and build one habitat that holds them all. Twenty minutes, and your colleagues feel neurological pluralism instead of hearing about it.
Penguin Pebbling
penguinpebbling.app — a card game built on the Five Autistic Love Locutions: infodumping, parallel play, support swapping, deep pressure, and penguin pebbling itself. Play online or print the cards. There are no winners and no wrong way to play. Good for the friendship-building strand of a group, and it works for solo reflection too, which matters for the members who are not ready to talk yet.
The Map of Monotropic Experiences
monotropicmap.org — an illustrated map of Monotropic experience, with free training published in full on the page, presenter notes included. The map is Helen Edgar’s artwork, developed further with Stimpunks, and the training explicitly invites you to adapt it for your own community group.
This is a strong fit for the learn-about-neurodiversity strand of a group — and consider who delivers it. A student presenting this map to staff is advocacy with a teaching artifact behind it, and it moves the group from receiving support to shaping the school.
Star Stuff
starstuff.earth — field guides and zines, many of them printable. Useful when someone wants something to take away and read alone rather than another activity to participate in. That is a real access need in a group setting, and it is easy to forget to serve it.
Allies belong here, and the group is still by and for us
A group for Neurodivergent students and allies has to hold two things at once, and it is worth deciding which is which before the first meeting rather than after the first conflict.
Peer support works because everyone in the room shares the experience. That is the mechanism. A room where Neurodivergent students are explaining themselves to an audience is a different room, doing a different job, and it will exhaust the people it was built for.
So: the core group is by and for Neurodivergent students, including students with no diagnosis and students still waiting for one. NEST is clear that a formal diagnosis is not the entry requirement, and in a system where assessment is gatekept by money, race, gender, and luck, making diagnosis the door would exclude exactly the students most worth reaching.
Allies come in at the edges, deliberately. NEST’s session outlines note where an activity is one that all students, Neurodivergent and allies, can attend. That is the right shape — specific open sessions, an awareness event, a project aimed at the wider school — with the ordinary weekly meeting reserved for peers.
Let the students draw that line. It is exactly the kind of decision that makes a group theirs.
Finding local partners
We are not going to hand you a list of organizations in your city, because a list we cannot maintain is a list that will eventually send someone to a door that is not there.
We can give you something more durable: a filter, and a few real on-ramps.
Use the filter first
Search for local autism and disability organizations and you will find plenty. A good number of them will be run about us rather than by us, and some of them fund and promote things that have harmed us.
Our Determining a Good Autism Organization page is the vetting guide — supports rather than cures, Autistic leadership, and what to do when an organization’s practice conflicts with what the Autistic community says about it. Run candidates through it before you introduce them to your students. This is the answer to how do I search, and it matters more than any list.
Real on-ramps
- The Autistic Self Advocacy Network — Autistic-run, and the anchor of self-advocacy in the United States.
- ASAN’s Pacific Alliance on Disability Self Advocacy — supports self-advocacy groups in Oregon, Washington, California, and Montana specifically, helping them organize in their own state and local communities. If you are in one of those four states, start here.
- Your state’s Protection and Advocacy agency and your Independent Living Centers — every state has both. They are statutory, they are findable, and they know who is actually operating locally.
- Our Organizations page — the Neurodivergent-led organizations we are in a rhizome with. Not partners in the corporate sense. Aligned presences in a shared ecology of care.
Send us what you find
Our service directory by location is thin in most states, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. The pages that are good are good because someone who actually lives and works there told us what was real.
If you find the organizations, groups, and people worth knowing in your area, tell us and we will add them with credit. Local knowledge is the only thing that makes a directory like this worth having.
Further reading
- Affinity Group — and Affinity Space, the interest-built spaces that suit a Monotropic processing style
- Employee Resource Group — the same idea, funded, for adults
- Multiage — why we do not sort people by manufacture date
- Psychological Safety
- Create a Neurodiversity Inclusive Environment
- Alternatives to ABA — the frameworks collection NEST sits in
- Neuroaffirming · Double Empathy Problem · Masking
- Our Library
One more thing, for the staff member reading this at the end of a long day.
You do not have to be good at this yet. The students are the experts in the room, the toolkit is free, and the first meeting only has to be a place where nobody has to mask for an hour.
Start there.