The Dean's Talks: Neurodiversity

### Feet to the Fire: Awakening Your Brilliance

The personal accountability session

Date: July 18th
Format: In person + livestream

The premise: This one starts with you. Not the system, not the diagnosis, not the institution. You. What are you doing with what you have? What has gone unactivated, unspoken and unseen. This is the permission you've been waiting for.

Feet to the Fire: Awakening Your Brilliance brings together creatives and artists who are openly neurodivergent and actively building their lives around their distinct minds, not despite them. This isn't empty inspiration, it's a real conversation about what it actually takes to stop deferring your own brilliance and start working with the mind you have.

What to expect:
Panel conversation (60 min) A debate between guests. Facilitated by Ebony Bates. Honest, unscripted, and willing to go wherever the room needs to go. Expect debate, disagreement, and moments that make you want to write something down.

Collage making (20 min) Magazines, stickers, scissors, mics, any medium you want, and a prompt drawn from the conversation. You'll make something in response to what came up. No experience required. No wrong answers. Whatever lands on the page is the right thing. (magazines and stickers provided)

Closing ritual (10 min) A collective moment to name one thing you're committing to before you leave the room.

Attend in person if you want to engage in the collage making, the open floor, the closing ritual. The physical act of making something together in response to the conversation. In person is where that lives fully.

Attend virtually if: You prefer minimal stimulation and controlled environments. The panel conversation should translate well to screen. Virtual attendees can collage at home and your closing ritual can be done in the chat.

Bring: Yourself. Optionally a magazine from home that means something to you. We provide: Magazines, stickers, scissors, glue sticks, cardstock, pens.

This will be a hybrid event. check back for confirmed location.

### Feet to the Fire: Designs that sharpen the Diverse Mind

The institutional accountability session

Date: September 12
Format: In person + livestream
The premise: What are the institutions in your life doing with what they have. The classroom. The workplace. The healthcare system. The neighborhood. These are not neutral containers. They were built from aggregate assumptions about how minds work. Have those assumptions included yours?
This isn't a grievance session. It's a design conversation. What would these spaces look like if they were built at a higher resolution? Who's already building them that way? And what does it take to demand better from the rooms you're already in?

What to expect:
Panel conversation (60 min) Educators and Administrators discuss the redesign of learning environments with the focus of cognitive inclusion. Facilitated by Ebony Bates, the conversation lives at the intersection of policy, practice, and the personal cost of systems that don't fit.

Open floor (20 min) Educators, administrators, OTs, parents, and practitioners in the room speak.

Closing ritual (10 min) Name one thing you're going to ask for from an institution, a system, a room that you've been swallowing.

### Feet to the Fire: Bright as You Are

The wholeness session
Date: November 14
Format: In person + livestream
The premise: Not everything needs to be awakened. Not everything needs to be sharpened. Some minds are not waiting to be activated they are already fully, completely, beautifully themselves. And the disability community has been saying this for years: there is value in difference that doesn't need to be optimized. There is worth in a mind that doesn't perform neurotypicality. There is brightness in a life that doesn't look like what the world told you it should.
This event is not about change. It's about recognition.
Bright as You Are holds space for the person who is exhausted by the conversation about potential and just wants to be seen as they already are.

What to expect:
Panel conversation (60 min) Two everyday guests discuss what it means to live and work from a mind of wholeness not optimization. Welcome disability advocates, artists, community builders, and parents of neurodivergent children who have moved through acceptance into celebration. The conversation is warm and unhurried, contrasting what the outer world can sometimes feel like.

Sharing circle (20 min) Optional. Participants share their version of living from wholeness. No pressure.

Closing ritual (10 min) A collective affirmation. Source material provdied in the way of my book, I Humbly Submit.