Denver Neurodivergent Community Support

Welcome to Joy Hertz's Neurodivergent (ND) Community Support Group!

We, as the small-but-dedicated team at Joy Hertz, are delighted and honored to be bringing a shared-leadership approach to these meetings and their organization. This meetup group’s events are currently on pause while we gain community input on what types of gatherings will offer the supports this group is looking for.

Please Share Your Input and Help Us Define the Group's Next Chapter!

We want to hear from everyone, and this includes you! Whether you’re a group regular or just visiting this page, whether you want to get more involved or simply offer feedback, please share your thoughts by filling out this survey, which will be open for two weeks until 10/23/26. Want to talk more in person? We will also be having two community discussion sessions (one virtual, one in-person, both in Oct/Nov). Please be on the look out for group updates as a result of the survey and in person sessions on this page and via group messages. If you’d prefer to get your updates through email newsletters, the option to sign up for that type of communication is available in the survey!

How Did We Get Here? Here’s our Group History!

This meetup group was started in early 2026 by a group member, Robee, with the aim of offering Denver’s neurodivergent community opportunities to give and receive peer (aka non-professional) support. As the group evolved and individual capacity changed, more support was needed to maintain the day-to-day organization of these events. Joy Hertz (a Denver nonprofit Robee contributed to for much of 2026) was grateful to accept the invitation to become the group’s new steward in September 2026.

Why the Change from Peer Support to Community Support?

While Joy Hertz stepped into this role, group members reached out looking for clarification about what to expect from a “peer support” group. Great question! After much reflection on those conversations, Joy Hertz staff decided to change the group’s name from “peer support” to “community support.” While “peer support” may imply that groups are led by certified peer support specialists, “community support” better aligns with the current intention of community members supporting one another outside of the bounds of traditional peer support models. Our hope is that this change in language will allow us a bit more flexibility in the types of support we can offer one another moving forward!

Why are the Events Paused?

We are genuinely committed to guiding any group changes in an ethical, grounded, accessible way, and have consulted experts in queer nonprofit development along with our neurodivergent peers for this purpose. Because of the number of questions on the table, we made the difficult decision to slow down our programming growth and limit our volunteer outreach to ensure our team could further develop our operations in a sustainable manner both for us as individuals, and as an organization.

As a result of those changes, we temporarily cleared this group’s event schedule to give us a chance to learn what the community wants from these gatherings going forward. Once we have direction from the community, we’ll begin scheduling events that offer the supports the group has identified for itself. We hope to have an every-other-week offering by early November.

We’re still figuring out what it means to be a responsible, responsive steward, hence our request for your feedback! We deeply value the time, energy, and labor that goes into offering us your hopes for the future of this group. Our goal is to honor this role by listening to the community and then supporting the development of the group’s capacity to meet the group’s wants and needs, as defined by the members.

Joy Hertz History & Staff

Joy Hertz was founded in 2024 by LJ who saw the need for an organization in Denver that holds space for the impact of self-injury and suicide among Denver’s LGBTQIA+ and ND populations. To that end, our programs focus on building a sense of belonging among our community members. Joy Hertz has always been grounded in a community philosophy that holding that space includes creating opportunities, through groups like this one, to build social communities rooted in authentic connection and belonging. We cannot wait to be of further service to this group as we learn & expand together!

The Joy Hertz staff includes LJ (they/them), who identifies as a queer, ND, nonbinary, parent, and creative person with lifelong struggles in finding a sense of belonging and community. Nick/Nicole T. Castro, MA (they/she), a queer, neurodivergent, biracial POC, disabled artist who brings a lens of embodiment and mindfulness to community liberation (especially start-up nonprofits) through art, play, and design. We also benefit from multiple other folks who share their experience, skills, energy, and time in order to support our efforts.