The colleague your nonprofit keeps losing is probably autistic

I'm writing this in my personal capacity, not as the ED of Common Cause Georgia.

We hire brilliant people in this sector. Detail-oriented. Pattern-spotters. The staff who notice the voter file looks off two weeks before everyone else does.

And then we lose them.

Not to better-paying tech jobs. To exhaustion. To being told they're "not a culture fit" because they asked for the agenda in writing. To managers who confused directness with disrespect.

A lot of those colleagues are autistic. Some have known their whole lives. Many figured it out in their thirties, after burning through three nonprofits in a row.

The numbers tell part of the story. The CDC's most recent autism prevalence report found 1 in 31 8-year-olds is autistic, and for the first time, Black (1 in 27), Hispanic (1 in 28), and Asian/Pacific Islander (1 in 26) children are being identified at higher rates than white children (CDC MMWR, 2025). Those kids grow up. Many of them end up working in our movements.

The diagnostic disparities are still real. Black children with autism are diagnosed an average of 5.4 years old, versus 4.9 nationally, and are far more likely to be diagnosed only when an intellectual disability is also present (Autism Speaks). That means a generation of Black and Latino autistic adults walked into our movement without a diagnosis, without language for what they needed, and without managers trained to provide it.

This is a retention problem with a civic engagement cost.

When a nonprofit loses an autistic organizer who built the county captain spreadsheet that actually worked, the cost isn't just the salary. It's the institutional memory that walks out the door, the relationships with three counties, and the eighteen months it takes the next person to learn the same things.

We built a course about this. Seven modules. 3.5 hours. Identity-first, anti-deficit, grounded in The Management Center's equitable-management practice. Written for managers, peers, and anyone who reports to an autistic colleague at a progressive nonprofit.

It's free.

It's free because the people doing this work in the South can't always afford a $400 management training, and the autistic colleagues they manage shouldn't have to wait for the budget to clear before they get a manager who knows what they're doing.

If you find the course useful, the way to keep it free for the next person is to take one of our paid courses, or donate. Both fund the rest of the catalog.

Start here: DatosLab — Working With and Celebrating Autistic Colleagues