Autism Speaks Launches National Housing and Support Survey

Within the next decade, a minimum of 500,000 individuals with autism will enter adulthood. Many of these individuals will require access to the adult services system — a system that can have exceedingly long waiting lists and few autism-specific supports for adults on the autism spectrum.

Autism Speaks is responding to this dilemma with a first-of-its-kind national survey to identify the current and future housing and residential support needs of the autism community. The survey will poll individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) ages 14 and older and their families/caregivers to identify the type of home and support services that they may need both now and in the future.

Nets' Guard Blindsided by Son's Diagnosis

Brooklyn Nets Deron Williams with
his son Deron Jr. aka DJ, 3, and
wife Amy at a celebration at
Brooklyn Borough Hall.

NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Sitting at a SoHo restaurant, expressing a mood seemingly solar systems removed from the Nets’ struggles on the court, Deron Williams is smiling while covered with orange face paint — “festive colors,” he calls it. A little girl comes up to Williams decorated like a tiger. He growls, prompting the child to growl back more ferociously.
Some other kids are opening gifts donated by Williams, with basketballs and X-Box games among the favorites. Every year the star point guard and his wife, Amy, put together this kind of charitable holiday party with their Point of Hope Foundation.
But on Saturday the theme is different: autism awareness. The inspiration is 3-year-old D.J. Williams, the energetic young boy walking around the restaurant with a pretzel stick and a toy.

Programs Help Autistic Students in College

Kevin Rinaldi speaks with a fellow
classmate at California
Lutheran University.

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. -- Kevin Rinaldi was so silent as a child that his mother studied sign language in case he never talked.
She didn't expect he would ever go to college. But the boy who was diagnosed with autism at 3 and didn't speak in sentences until he was 6 earned As and Bs as a freshman last year at California Lutheran University. He edged into the social life at the Thousand Oaks university, too, living with roommates and joining a club.