Our Work
The infrastructure the field has been missing.
How We Work
The Standards Engine defines what counts: establishing competencies and standards, identifying outcomes measurement protocols, and developing guidelines that support ethical, effective services and care for autistic individuals and their families.
The Influence Engine makes it matter: advocating for Autism Professionals and the people we serve, shaping policy at the highest levels, aligning payers and systems, and setting workforce expectations.
Both engines run on the same fuel: the expertise of Autism Professionals.
Governance
Building NSAP's architecture requires the field's expertise from the start.
During NSAP's founding phase, seven Domain Advisory Councils will guide the development of the organization's architecture, priorities, and standards work, ensuring that Autism Professional expertise from each domain has direct input into how NSAP is built to serve the field.
Domain Advisory Councils are a founding-phase structure. Their work informs the architecture that NSAP's Board of Directors will inherit.
Clinical and health systems care
Financing, policy, and system design
Workplace and organizational design
Innovation and enterprise
Research, measurement, and outcomes science
Education and workforce preparation
Legal and advocacy systems
Council members are drawn from NSAP membership.
Two Task Forces
NSAP is launching with two founding task forces, each with a defined mandate and a clear endpoint.
Across settings, professionals measure outcomes differently, or don't measure them at all. Some use validated instruments; others rely on goal-oriented assessments with no psychometric properties. The result is a field that cannot reliably demonstrate what works, for whom, and under what conditions.
That gap has consequences.
This task force will convene psychometric experts, outcomes scientists, and professionals across domains to analyze properties of existing measures and current practices, and then develop recommended protocols for standardizing outcomes measurement for specific purposes in specific settings.
What must a professional demonstrate to claim the title "Autism Professional"?
The silence of ambiguity has costs:
This task force will develop a cross-disciplinary framework of standards that defines competencies across the seven professional domains. The framework will inform education and training programs, shape credentialing standards, and lay the foundation for future continuing education and certification pathways through NSAP.
NSAP is shaped by its members. Service on Domain Advisory Councils and task forces is open to NSAP members. If you have the expertise and the commitment to help build the infrastructure this field has always needed, we want to hear from you.