A panellist described the NDIS and business advice as two worlds that never meet

At the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Melbourne, one panellist described the problem facing autistic founders on the NDIS through a single founder, who sits with a business adviser and explains which challenges need to be accommodated as the business develops, takes the adviser’s information away and works on it, and then separately has to work on an NDIS plan and its goals. The panellist called them “two completely different worlds that don’t understand each other”.

Earlier, Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, had asked the panel what the future looked like in policy terms for building a support ecosystem. The answer started with recognition. In Australia, the panellist who took the question said, there was growing awareness that people in the NDIS world who wanted to move into entrepreneurship faced an entrepreneurial ecosystem that worked differently for people who were also engaged with a service system. One was the entrepreneurial ecosystem, and the other was what the NDIS, in the panellist’s words, called the community participation ecosystem, meaning support services and everything around them. The question, the panellist said, was “how do we actually bring those two systems together to support autistic entrepreneurs”.