Many adults with Autism experience sensory processing sensitivities as a part of their diagnosis. Research shows that 94.4% of adults with Autism report co-occurring sensory abnormalities. These sensitivities can create accessibility challenges for the autistic community, especially for autistic individuals with hypersensitivities. This study will explore how these sensory sensitivities are experienced as barriers to accessing public spaces and the impact that limited access has on quality of life experienced by autistic adults. The author will develop a self-report survey to assess the frequency, diversity, and intensity of these barriers and create a publication which will include the photographs and narratives of the participants experiences of sensory dysregulation as a barrier. The survey and the publication will be reviewed through the process Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR). Data will be obtained through using photovoice, narratives, and surveys highlighting the subjective experiences that hypersensitive autistic adults encounter in their everyday lives in the public sphere. We anticipate that multiple barriers to access will be reported by participants though we recognize these may differ in form, place, and intensity. The outcome of the proposed study will be used to center the voices of the self-advocating autism community about the barriers they experience daily and to promote policy change to create more sensory friendly public spaces.

For many high schoolers having a mentor can significantly alter their life course. For marginalized youth, research has shown that quality mentoring increases the likelihood for high school graduation, addresses socio-emotional needs, and improves mentee’s behavioral skills. Mentoring is one of many interventions schools might use to address students with multiple risk factors such as poverty, housing instability, food insecurity, and discrimination. These many risk factors, in turn, lead to a disproportionately negative high school experience and higher rates of socio-emotional and behavioral issues than students with fewer risk factors. However, increasingly schools have turned to more punitive carceral approaches to manage these negative behaviors by increasing the presence of police officers, security guards, or school resource officers into public school settings. One Portland program works to address this issue by implementing a community care based mentoring program. This study seeks to understand the experiences of both policing and community care mentoring for freshman and sophomore students at three urban public high schools. This study will take on a mixed-methods approach. A survey will be composed to collect quantitative self-report data, as well as semi-structured interview guide to collect qualitative data in the form of open ended questions. The findings from this study will inform the power of community care in high school in relation to mentoring students of color vulnerable to the school-to-prison pipeline, which can be used to inform the argument to remove police from schools and for the continuation of mentoring programs and the allocation of increased federal funding to provide further support for this program and ones similar.