The Autistic Voices Oral History Project Fellowship Program

April 2025 Update: Help Us Sustain Our Fellowship Program

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In 2024, we received federal support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to launch a groundbreaking fellowship to co-create an Archive of Autistic stories, but in April 2025, our grant was abruptly terminated by DOGE and the Trump administration. Now, we need to raise $81,400 to ensure this work continues.
 

Your donation would directly support remaining stipends for fellows, narrators, and project staff and helps preserve Autistic stories that might otherwise be lost.

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About the Fellowship

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In 2024, the Autistic Voices Oral History Project (tAVOHP) received a grant from IMLS to fund The Autistic Lived Experience: Community Curation and Memory Workers Fellowship. This fellowship program aims to expand understanding of neurodiversity, foster collective and accessible community documentation of the Autistic lived experience and advocacy movement, and enhance the fields of archives and oral history.
 

In collaboration with the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) and the Association for Autism and Neurodiversity (AANE), this fellowship program features two distinct tracks:
 

1. The Autistic Community Fellowship, open to Autistic community members, aims to build a more representative historical record by centering Autistic narratives and empowering Autistic people to play an active role in capturing and preserving their community’s memory.
    

2. The Memory Workers Fellowship trains non-Autistic (allistic) and Autistic professionals working in archives, libraries, and oral history, as well as students in LIS, on neuro-affirming practices, cross-neurotype communication, and Autistic culture.

Twenty-four fellows were selected out of 350 applicants, with twelve participants in each fellowship track. Each fellow will participate in a workshop and conduct two interviews, resulting in 48 interviews being added to the tAVOHP interview collection.