A place they are expected — not a place they had to earn.

Our Story

What “Burgeon” Means

To burgeon is to grow rapidly, to send out new shoots, to flourish. Botanists use the word to describe the moment a plant pushes past dormancy and begins growing in a way that is visible and increasingly difficult to contain.

I chose the name because that is what this work has always been about: creating the right conditions for people who have been told they are too much, too different, or too complicated to thrive, and then giving them the opportunity to burgeon anyway.

It is also, not coincidentally, a word connected to roots. Nothing burgeons out of nowhere. The growth we eventually see usually began long before it became visible.

Where It Really Began

This project did not begin with a website, a business plan, or a carefully developed five-year strategy. It began in 2011, when I looked at the road ahead for my son and understood, with sudden and painful clarity, that his life was going to look very different from the lives of the other children on our street. His road was likely to be harder, lonelier, and far less forgiving of the ways he moved through the world.

At the time, autism was diagnosed far less frequently than it is today, and the support landscape looked nothing like it does now. There was no clear map for what came next, especially for families trying to understand how childhood services, education, employment, independence, and adulthood were ever supposed to connect.

So I began writing my own map publicly through the Loving the Spectrum blog. Beneath everything I wrote was one goal: I wanted my son to know that he belonged somewhere.

He is 22 now, and the isolation did not remain in childhood. It followed him.

School was too often a place where he was scorned rather than supported. COVID, and the years of enforced distance that followed, nearly broke him completely. More recently, he walked away from a job, not because he could not do the work, but because the daily exhaustion of masking became too much. Performing “neurotypical enough” to be accepted, hour after hour and day after day, eventually cost him more than the job gave back.

This is not a story unique to my son or our family.

Many people with Level 1 and Level 2 autism live with a particular and largely invisible kind of pain. They may be cognitively aware enough to understand exactly how differently they are being treated and how frequently they are being excluded, while still lacking the social tools, support, or accommodating environment needed to change what is happening.

That combination, full awareness paired with very real rejection, is exhausting in a way the outside world rarely sees and accommodates even less often.

What followed for my family was not a straight line, and it certainly was not an easy one. It has been a long, hard slog filled with days that felt like failure, even though I never stopped trying and our lives never stopped moving forward.

That feeling does not disappear completely. As a parent, there is always the private ache of wondering whether I did enough, found enough, fought hard enough, or missed the one thing that might have changed everything.

But perhaps there is another possibility.

What if everything I have learned can help build something that outlasts me? What if it becomes a real community where my children, other people’s children, and families like ours can belong long after we are no longer the ones holding everything together?

What if this becomes the place where other people’s children finally get to grow, thrive, contribute, and become part of something?

Then “I tried everything I could” becomes more than a private ache. It becomes the root of something that continues to grow.

Where the Organization Began

In 2015, four years after I began Loving the Spectrum, that mission took its first institutional form as Burgeon Academy.

Burgeon Academy was a small alternative learning school created for children who did not fit comfortably within a standard classroom. It was designed for students navigating emotional and behavioral challenges who needed individualized education rather than another attempt to force them into a one-size-fits-all system.

Burgeon Academy was real. It was a registered nonprofit in good standing, built by hand from my belief that children who had been failed by conventional structures were not necessarily the problem. Very often, the structures surrounding them were.

The school served real students and real families who had run out of other options.

Along the way, the organization took a detour. In the hope that greater resources might allow it to do more good, I placed it in the hands of people who, for a time, meant well. Life moved forward, priorities changed, and the paperwork required to keep a nonprofit alive quietly stopped being filed. By the time anyone looked closely again, the organization had lapsed.

That could have been the end of the story.

It was not.

Why I Am Building This Now

The years between then and now were not wasted. They were an education.

Building an organization and then losing it teaches you things no strategic plan can. It teaches you the difference between a support system designed to last and one that appears strong on paper but collapses when responsibility lands with the wrong person. It teaches you to establish governance before building the website. It teaches you that ownership, transparency, accountability, and staying power matter more than good intentions alone.

Most importantly, it teaches you who needs to be in the room from the beginning.

The Burgeon Project is the continuation of my original vision. It is not a rebrand, and it is not a new idea that appeared overnight. It comes from the same conviction that led me to begin writing in 2011 and to create a small alternative school in 2015. The difference is that the vision has now been shaped by nearly two decades of advocacy, lived experience, difficult lessons in nonprofit leadership, and a much clearer understanding of what a lasting support community for neurodivergent people and their families actually requires.

I am building this alongside people who understand the need because they have lived it themselves: parents who have fought the same battles, sat through the same meetings, searched for the same missing resources, and wondered what would happen to their children when they could no longer personally hold every fragile piece together.

This work is not new.

It is what was always supposed to grow here, finally being given the roots, structure, and room it needs to burgeon.