Current NAT Directors:

Kabie Brook

Autistic activist, mother & campaigner, Kabie has 30 years’ experience working paid and unpaid with and for Autistic people of all ages and perceived ability, including in the social care sector. Kabie has specialised in supporting people labelled as having ‘challenging behaviour’. Kabie is cofounder and current chairperson of ARGH – Autism Rights Group Highland, member of the Scottish Government Autism Strategy Review Group, was involved with the development of ASK (Autistic Space Kit) and holds a community advisor role for Police Scotland.

Kabie is experienced in working with and supporting other autistic people in the context of organizational governance, including organizing a forum to support the development of autistic people’s organizations in Scotland. Kabie also has experience in running focus groups of autistic people, including for the Scottish Government Improving Understanding of Autism Programme.

Dr Yo Dunn

Yo is a trainer and consultant who, through her company Consult Yo Ltd., works across the public sector (primarily in adult social care) with specialisms in autism and public law. She is experienced in working closely with professionals at all levels in local authorities, care providers and in schools. She creates and delivers high level training on the legal frameworks of social care (including statutory duties for assessment and care planning, adult safeguarding and mental capacity law, amongst others) and specialist training on autism for local authorities, care providers, social care sector organisations such as OPG and ADASS and in the education sector. As a result, she has a thorough and up to date working knowledge of public law and professional practice issues in both adult and children’s services for autistic people both with and without intellectual disabilities and a multi-faceted perspective on a range of issues across a wide range of settings in health and social care.

She is experienced in consultancy and project management, including through the highly successful St. Clement’s Autism Centre of Excellence project, awarded two consecutive grants from the Scottish Autism Strategy, during which Yo produced the St. Clement’s Practical Autism videos and worked collaboratively at all levels of the organisation to achieve and maintain substantial culture change (see here). More recently, Yo served as legal and policy consultant to the National Autism Project, before becoming strategic lead of NAT and leading the development of the NAT Independent Guide to Quality Care for Autistic People. She also served on behalf of NAT on the Steering Group for the Department of Health and Social Care’s Core Capabilities Framework for Supporting Autistic People and has consulted for the British Association of Social Worker’s Homes not Hospitals campaign.

A published author in both education and social work, Yo’s academic background is in social policy analysis and her doctorate is in educational research, which includes expertise in project evaluation. She now writes primarily on legal and policy topics (mostly in areas affecting autistic people), including regular case law reports and her book on Social Work with Autistic People (published Sept 2020).

Yo is autistic, a parent of autistic children and has lengthy experience of being involved in the adult self-advocate community, having retired after many years as company secretary of Autscape.

Dr Damian Milton

Damian works part-time for the Tizard Centre, University of Kent as a Lecturer in Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and for the National Autistic Society (NAS) as Autism Knowledge and Expertise Consultant. Damian also teaches on the MA Education (Autism) programme at London South Bank University and consulted for the Transform Autism Education (TAE) project and a number of projects for the Autism Education Trust (AET).

Damian is autistic and parent of an autistic child. Damian’s primary focus is on increasing the meaningful participation of autistic people and people with learning disabilities in the research process and chairs the Participatory Autism Research Collective (PARC).

Jo Minchin

Diagnosed autistic in her late 30s, Jo has been employed as an Expert by Lived Experience by the NHS since 2014. Initially this was by a Clinical Commissioning Group to expand and improve services locally, but it quickly incorporated working in Care and Treatment Reviews as part of the NHSE Transforming Care programme. Jo’s NHS work has since expanded to national work in NHSE as an autistic consultant and currently she is co-chair of the Midlands Autism Strategy Workstream. She is also vice-chair of the advisory group to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Autism.

Jo holds a Masters with distinction on autism in adults from the University of Birmingham and has three adult neurodivergent offspring with differing support needs. She has an interest in national policy and has been involved with the National Autistic Taskforce since 2019.

Founder:

Dinah Murray 1946-2021

Dinah Murray was an independent researcher with a PhD on the topic of Language and Interests; a campaigner, a support worker for people with varied learning disabilities including autism and a tutor for Birmingham University’s distance learning courses on autism (adults) tutoring practitioners. Her autism related work has been published in Autism, in Good Autism Practice, Autonomy, a number of books and on-line; she presented at numerous conferences on varied themes related to autism.

Dinah’s autism-related research interests included: medication and its impact on quality of life; information technology for people who don’t use speech; the ethics of autism research; the nature of the human being, with a particular focus on interests. She was assessed as autistic, and if growing up today would certainly have attracted an autism diagnosis. From the early ‘90s Dinah was involved in campaigns around abusive prescribing practices, access to digital communications and generally active removal of barriers to the acceptance, appreciation and expression of autistic and other atypical variants of the human being.

After three years on the National Autism Project‘s Strategy Board, where she established an Autistic Advisory Panel which proved highly useful, Dinah was honoured to get an unsolicited donation from Dame Stephanie Shirley of £100,000. This was earmarked for the National Autistic Taskforce, launched at the start of 2018 with a remit to address justice and autonomy for autistic people, especially those who don’t use speech effectively to meet their needs.

Dinah was also associated in a formal or informal capacity with: the Participatory Autism Research Collective; Autangel; the Autistic Advisory Group to Hirsch at Glasgow Uni; the Autism Dialogue; a game development project to highlight the great diversity of autism; promotion of a Communication Support Worker (CSW) role; and the AutNav project.

The Team