Autism STEP: Your Autism Spectrum Advocate
Autism STEP Australia provides spectrum education and person-centred autism training. We specialise in supporting autistic and neurodiverse people to transition through lifestages, from education to employment, and ultimately independence. Our aim? To transform autism awareness and neurodiverse perceptions in society. Our autism courses provide opportunities for both autism professional development, organisational autism training, autism courses for parents as well as autism mentoring for individuals.
Ask Me What I Need: Autism Training Program
Our autism awareness training program for emergency services targets preparedness, response and recovery strategies when engaging with autistic youth and adults in an emergency. Successfully trialed to Red Cross Volunteers, and St John's Ambulance, it won the 2020 Resilience NSW community awards and the 2020 National Resilience Award Community category. 'Ask Me What I Need' was praised as the only training program developed encompassing autism needs in emergency, created in consultation with the autism community and emergency personnel.
What does S.T.E.P in Autism STEP Australia mean?
S.T.E.P stands for Spectrum. Transitions. Education Programs, but step is also an encouraging process that takes place over time. Autism STEP Australia has worked with many institutions both government and private to ensure that Autistic people live the life they want. The life they deserve. We work with schools and the next step in education, training or employment. We provide strategies to our individual autistic clients to build independence, and strategies to develop self-empowerment and self-actualisation. This may include areas such as sensory triggers and anxiety that may be impacting their lives, managing stresses and learning self-care strategies.
Berinda Karp - Founder of Autism STEP Australia
Everyone who is neurodiverse or on the autism spectrum expresses their diversity differently. Autism STEP believes in person-centred training tailored to match your learning. needs. Understanding the necessity value of being unconventional is where Berinda Karp, AutismSTEP's mentor and lead instructor, excels at. She opens the door towards independence, growth, and change, targeting shared goals. Program-manager for 'Ask Me What I Need', Berinda's autism professional development, autism training courses, and neurodiverse personal training and care was built upon decades of experience with autism education and her professional qualifications in education. Berinda has attained Graduate Diploma in Special Education, a Bachelors of Education from UWS, a Masters of Education from UNSW, as well as supportive vocational qualifications from TAFE NSW such as Cert IV in Vocational Training and Assessment, Cert III in Mentoring, Cert IV Sydney Institute Vocational Education & Training Disability Services. An avid believer of education and continuous upskilling, Berinda is currently enrolled in a Diploma of Counselling to broaden her skills and offer.
“I met Berinda quite a few years ago when initially it was a recommendation from the support unit at my son’s school. He’d been having some learning difficulties and difficulty adjusting and um, the name Berinda Karp came up from AutismSTEP. So I actually contacted Berinda and Berinda established immediately a wonderful rapport with Toby. Um there was a kind of spiritual connection between her and my son at the time. It was lovely. That initial meeting fostered genuinely relationships with my son and helping him… He’s become more independent and self-reassured, more confident, it’s been a capacity-building in terms of just even going out to talk with other people a little bit. Toby had been completely isolated and by organising a TAFE and getting him to participate in a supported TAFE scheme, he was able to integrate with others. Berinda hasn’t just helpd with one thing. She helped with NDIS, she’s helped with disability support, helped me organise the clinical services in order to be able to link those up and get into the administration side."
"Berinda is amazing! Her knowledge and experience in this area of Autism is excellent."
A Considered World
The thing about Autism STEP Australia is that we aim to help build a more considered world. Autistic people often behave in non typical ways. A lot of autistic mentoring focuses on helping people with autism adapt and survive in a typical world. By working with organisations such as schools, government agencies (FACS) and employers, we offer a solution of convergence. What this means is we ask the typical world to make small but regular changes so that we evolve into a considered world.
One way this has been done is by Bonnie Shaver-Troup, EdD, the creator of the Lexend project, is focused on making reading easier for everyone. As an educational ecimen/Letherapist, Bonnie created the first Lexend typeface in early 2001 aiming to reduce visual stress and to improve reading performance for those with dyslexia and other struggling readers. Today, Bonnie’s goal is to make the Lexend fonts accessible to a larger spectrum of users thanks to the support of many talented collaborators.
Austism STEP Australia have chosen this font for our entire brand.