What Carya and The Sinneave Family Foundation learned by adapting existing expertise to address community need
Innovation in the social sector is often associated with something entirely new: a new program, model, or service built from the ground up.
But innovation can also mean recognizing what already works, identifying what is missing, and bringing the right expertise together around a community need. That was the thinking behind Relationships with Your Autistic Adult Children, a collaborative pilot developed by Carya and The Sinneave Family Foundation.
The program brought together two distinct areas of expertise: Sinneave’s knowledge of autism and neuro-inclusivity, and Carya’s established practice in supporting family relationships, navigating life transitions and facilitating structured opportunities for communication and skill development.
The result offers a broader lesson for the social sector: meeting complex community needs does not always require organizations to do more on their own. Sometimes, it requires us to become better at doing things together.
Recognizing a need where organizational missions intersected
As Sinneave supported Autistic adults through employment, post-secondary education, housing and independent living transitions, the team recognized another important part of those transitions: the parents, caregivers and other natural supports navigating change alongside them.
As autistic adults grow in independence, family relationships can evolve too. Questions about communication, expectations, boundaries, support and changing roles may become increasingly complex.
“That recognition prompted us to consider how parents and caregivers could also be better supported,” says Amy Tatterton, Sinneave’s Director of Learning and Connection.
Rather than starting from scratch, Sinneave looked for existing expertise in supporting families that could be adapted. Carya offered a natural starting point.
Through Relationships With Your Adult Children, Carya already had an established curriculum designed to help parents examine changing family roles, expectations, communication and boundaries as their children move further into adulthood. These were many of the same relational questions Sinneave was hearing from families.
Instead of creating something new from the ground up, the organizations asked what might happen if they combined what each already knew.
Carya brought expertise in relationships, family dynamics, life transitions and group facilitation. Sinneave brought its autism and neuro-inclusivity lens. Together, they adapted the existing curriculum for parents and caregivers of autistic adults.
“Our expertise at Carya is in relationships and helping people navigate the changes that happen across a lifetime. We didn’t need to become autism experts to respond to this need. By bringing our relational expertise together with Sinneave’s knowledge of autism and neuro-inclusivity, we could co-create something stronger and more thoughtful than either organization would have developed on their own,” shares Jade Powers, Director of Programs at Carya.
For Tatterton, the collaboration demonstrates what can happen when organizations are willing to look beyond traditional sector boundaries: combine expertise, work more efficiently and respond to a gap in the community without duplicating what already exists.
Participants reported increased confidence, stronger communication skills, and reduced feelings of isolation following the six-week program.
The first cohort was evaluated using the same survey before and after the six-week group. Participants responded to eight statements related to communication, independence, family relationships, confidence and well-being.
Across those measures, the average score increased from 62.5% before the group to 80% afterward. Participants ended the group reporting greater confidence, comfort and access to useful strategies for navigating their relationships with their adult children.
One of the largest changes was in participants’ confidence supporting their adult child as their independence evolves, which increased from 50% to 83%. Participants also reported improvement in feeling equipped to navigate difficult conversations or conflict, while feelings of isolation decreased.
The participant feedback gives those numbers additional meaning.
“It is striking how many common and shared experiences there were amongst our group of parents of autistic adults.”
Another participant shared that they had already used concepts from the program during conversations with their adult child.
And one reflected:
“These past six weeks have helped guide me into a more positive frame of mind. I was feeling pretty defeated and alone. Things have been better at home with my son as well.”
Participants also described the environment as non-judgmental and valued the balance between information and open discussion.
For facilitators, that opportunity to reflect alongside others was an important part of what unfolded:
“What stood out was how thoughtful and self-aware the parents were. They knew their adult children incredibly well and were open to trying new approaches, but they were also balancing a lot. The group gave them dedicated space to step outside of the day-to-day, reflect on how the relationship was changing and learn alongside other parents navigating many of the same questions,” shared program co-facilitator, Shannon Baxter.
Both organizations recognize that while the early findings are encouraging, they are also just that: early. As this was a small first cohort of eight participants, additional data derived from future cohorts will help validate impact and inform future evolutions.
A different way to think about innovation
There is a broader lesson in this collaboration.
Relationships with Your Autistic Adult Children came together because Carya and Sinneave each saw an opportunity to contribute something distinct. Carya brought an established relational framework and experience supporting families through life transitions. Sinneave brought an autism and neuro-inclusivity lens that helped shape how that framework could be adapted for a specific community.
For Carya and Sinneave, the answer was to build on existing strengths, learn from one another and co-create something stronger that neither would have approached in quite the same way independently.
The value of the partnership was not simply in sharing the work. It was in how each organization influenced the final approach.
The future of innovation may depend less on inventing new solutions independently and more on finding expertise that already exists, thinking about it differently, and building around what people actually need. This kind of collaboration invites organizations to ask:
- What is the community telling us it needs?
- What can we contribute meaningfully?
- And who could help us make the response stronger?
Community impact may be greater when organizations, groups, families, and individuals who are working to address complex community challenges adapt existing strengths and collaborate to create, instead of building parallel solutions.
Interested in exploring what collaboration could make possible?
Carya and The Sinneave Family Foundation believe stronger community responses can emerge when organizations and professionals bring their distinct expertise together. Learn more about our work or connect with us if you see an opportunity to bring our expertise together to strengthen how we respond to community needs.