Presvytera Melanie DiStefano: Welcome to Family Matters: Fully Human Edition. This is Melanie DiStefano. Today I am joined by Dr. Lisa Liberatore, a board-certified otolaryngologist. Her husband, Dr. Dimitri Kessaris, a board-certified urologist, were inspired by their autistic son, Michael, to found two non-profit organizations: Luv Michael, founded in 2015, and US Autism Homes, founded in 2019.

Dr. Liberatore stepped away from her successful private practice after 25 years in order to focus on a crisis affecting her son and thousands of others on the autism spectrum. The statistics for adults on the autism spectrum are alarming, with a 90% underemployment and unemployment rate, and over 400% higher suicide rate. There is an intense need for attention to this problem. Her passion to help her son and others in the same situation has led to the impressive early success of both non-profit programs, providing a life of dignity and purpose for autistic adults beyond the lives of their parents. Based in New York, these two 501(c)3s focus on creating meaningful work and alternative shared living opportunities. The goal is creating a sustainable model to be able to offer this opportunity to all who need it and to replicate this model across the country.

Luv Michael is a non-profit granola bakery in Tribeca, New York City, focused on training, educating, and employing autistic adults. In addition to Luv Michael’s education of the autistic population, in 2020, they launched a volunteer community service program. The volunteer program engages high school and college students to advocate for autism acceptance while helping fundraise for the organization. The volunteers are educated on the current issues facing the autism community, and advocate digitally to help educate others. In the past 14 months, over 14,000 teenagers from 29 countries have engaged in meaningful conversations with over 300,000 people. The goal of this initiative is to create a more empathetic and accepting worldwide community and reach as many people as possible.

The second non-profit, US Autism Homes, focuses on helping to solve the current housing crisis impacting autistic individuals and their families. US Autism Homes aims to help answer the question: What happens when the parents are no longer around to care for their autistic child? The USAH model is combine a cluster of homes with a faith-based supportive community. Currently, US Autism Homes operates three homes in Southampton, New York, and has successfully transitioned individuals into an engaging shared living experience. The Dormition of the Virgin Mary Greek Orthodox Church in Southampton, New York, provides a place for daily classes and programs as well as a network of community members who are fuelled by helping and serving those in need.

Both organizations have received global media coverage, including WABC’s World News Tonight, Fox News, Senator Bill Bradley’s podcast American Voices, Greek Television ERT, WBCBS, and WABC’s Radio Live with the Louhs. With one in 44 families being impacted by autism, these organizations rely on public support to tackle these ever-growing issues for autistic individuals and their families.

Welcome to Fr. Constantine Lazarakis who is the proistamenos as the Dormition of the Virgin Mary Church in Southampton, who works in partnership with Dr. Lisa to run US Autism Homes and Luv Michael. Fr. Constantine had experiences in his early career with special education, worked with people with disabilities, and has a heart for such individuals. I also am glad to be with him today. He is a classmate of mine from Holy Cross. So welcome to you both.

Fr. Constantine Lazarakis: Thanks so much.

Presv. Melanie: We gave everyone some really nice background on what the organizations do. Maybe if we could hear a little bit more about the personal side of the story—Dr. Lisa, if you could share a little bit about Michael.

Dr. Liberatore: Sure! I have two sons, Michael and Alexander. Alexander has actually just turned 26; Michael will be 25 this month. Michael is on the autism spectrum, pretty severe, so about 35% of autistic individuals have more profound autism. He has significant difficulty with expressive language, [which makes] it very hard to integrate into a society workplace without significant support. And so when he was about 17 years old, that’s when I had the “aha” moment that, wow, if we didn’t create something for him, he probably wouldn’t have any opportunity for meaningful work. We focused on what his skills were, and we had opportunities to volunteer in our church and demonstrate that he really did have the focus and the love for cooking.

And so in trying to figure out an opportunity to do that, we tried to innovate. We found a teacher who had graduated from the culinary school in Manhattan. She just had a baby. We took him out of school two days a week to focus on that in our home, and then started to see that this was a path towards meaningful work. But I wanted him to be with other people, so the chef said, “Why don’t you make granola?” Because granola doesn’t have any knives in the process, so we can do a whole thing in one shift; we can complete the process. So it’s weighing, measuring, mixing, rolling, cracking, packaging the product. And we said, “Okay, let’s create a little home business. Let’s teach Michael and others some gratitude,” so we said, “Okay, sign it: Luv, Michael.” And that’s kind of how it started, from our home with just a few students.

And this is truly a blessed project, because literally I kept meeting the next person to help us with the journey. So the next person was a couple who worked an entrepreneur kitchen in Long Island City. They helped businesses leave their home, and they sort of mentor home businesses. We started to work in Long Island City, and very quickly other families started to find out about us, because there really weren’t options for young men and women aging out of school. So we kept growing. We’d rent more shifts; we’d rent storage.

Before we knew it, we were expanding beyond the space. My husband and I have a space in Tribeca, New York City. We were going to use that for something medical. And with the help of a gentleman who has a lot of experience in the food business, we formed a non-profit, we asked him to join the board, and we built out a beautiful commercial kitchen, a classroom, in the heart of New York City.

And really that’s because—we believed in that: We build it, and it will happen. So we just felt: Let’s go full steam. So many people want this. And we finished the ribbon-cutting in 2019, and COVID of course hit in March 2020. After a few months we had to close the kitchen, but that allowed us to innovate, and one of the things we innovated during that time was this teenage program to help teenagers who were looking for community service. They couldn’t do it because of COVID, so we gave them an opportunity to really do something impactful: learn about what the issue was affecting autistic young adults, go out and share this conversation with family and friends, help them become an ally of the autism community, which is really what the problem is.

Our young men and women are the best workers. Our employees are amazing. They’re so proud of the work they do. And people will say, “Well, do any of them go on to work in other businesses?” And the truth is that most other businesses don’t have the support necessary to help somebody, especially with severe communication issues, to be successful. And so we really wanted to help educate the world. When you stop and think about it, that’s so much more meaningful right now, because we can help so many more people than we can work in the kitchen.

We do have a full operating kitchen. They make granola there. Everybody’s welcome to come and visit. We have about 30 participants who are fully employed. They get paid at least $15 an hour, $17 an hour if they pass the food handlers exam. They become mentors to the new people who are joining. And it really is super meaningful for those employees.

But at the same time, as Michael was getting older, the second sort of challenge really struck us at around when he turned 19, between 19 and 21, like many young men on the spectrum, they struggle with what’s happening with them hormonally, not having enough language to understand what’s going on, a lot of frustration, and that was no different for Michael. He had tremendous frustration, very, very agitated to the point that we had to move him into a type of group home for him to be safe and for us to get our head around what was going on. And during that time, we started to look at: Okay, what are the solutions or what are the situations around homes?

And we were really, really not happy with the option of a group home. Most of the group homes had eight to ten people in a home. The staff did not seem very engaged. They were not paid well, so there was such a crazy turnover, and they were not really educated about autism specifically. So we started to think about what are the other options. One option was to create a self-directed funded model. In other words, it’s a private-public partnership between getting subsidy from the government and then coming together in a shared house situation where people actually choose their roommates, choose their staff. They actually choose the kind of life they want to have and what work and opportunities they want. And they choose where they want to live.

We were made aware of an approach that could have a faith-based supported community in an interdenominational way as an anchor to that group of homes. And because I had that relationship with the Greek Orthodox Church for 25 years, it was the obvious faith-based organization to approach and say, “Would you take this journey with us? I don’t exactly know what we’re asking. We’re asking for, beyond the love an acceptance that a parent would have for their child, that the church and the church family would also grow to love and accept and sort of be an extended network of support beyond the parents and in the even that the parents died, then that would continue.”

And so that’s what we did. We built the first house, walking distance to the Greek Orthodox church. We moved my son in there, and then slowly, over the year, moved three more young men in there, who were all in their 20s, and they all actually knew each other from Luv Michael, which is very interesting, that Luv Michael sort of became the funnel for who would get to know each other to want to live together. And that’s what we started to figure out, and there was no blueprint for it. Two years later, we have three houses for 11 people: four young men in the first house; the second house is for four young men also in their 20s; and the third house is for three young women. And those other two houses are not fully occupied yet, but it’s taken over a year to see who is compatible, whose families are compatible, and getting all their social services in place to be able to make it work. But we’ve identified the families, we have a full, active board, and Fr. Constantine and Presvytera Xanthi are on the board, and we have an admissions committee, we have a human rights committee. We really try to see what problems we might have and what obstacles we may have. But it’s going well. It’s going really well.

Presv. Melanie: In both incidents, for both organizations, you met a challenge with action to address the needs that you were seeing that your son had, but not just for him, but for others in the community. It’s impressive. I am wondering how the church community pairs with you and what those relationships look like. Maybe, Father, you can talk a little bit about that.

Fr. Constantine: Sure. Well, you know, one of the things that I always like to say about this work is that I think it’s kind of amazing how the Church’s role in all of this really grew organically. In the beginning, Michael was a kid, and he was coming to church with Mom and Dad, and it was hard to get through Divine Liturgy with him, and a lot of times Lisa would have to take him out.

And Fr. Alex, who still serves at the church with me, back at the church in those days was the only priest at the parish here. And Lisa and Dimitri got together and said, “Well, let’s see how we can make this work.” It took a lot of time to just sensitize Michael to the different sights and sounds and everything in the church, and the time he could tolerate in church grew and grew and grew and grew, and then it wasn’t about the time he could tolerate in church: he loved being in church.

And because Fr. Alex and Lisa and Dimitri just had the patience and the foresight and the love to say, “Okay, let’s take this slow and go at it and see how we can make it work,” church became one of Michael’s favorite places to be. And he did everything: served in the altar, volunteered in the kitchen, so on and so forth.

Another interesting thing about Luv Michael and US Autism Homes that I admire so much is that every parent wants to do everything for their kid, right? But Lisa and Dimitri and the US Autism Home-Luv Michael family have done something very special, and they’ve kind of gone beyond “I want to do everything for my kid”; they’ve recognized we have a boiling crisis for autistic people everywhere, and for the community and for the community at large. “So whatever we’re going to do for Michael, let’s try and do it in a way that’s open to others and in a way that’s replicable for other communities,” because these things are going on for everybody everywhere.

So back to your original question, the church’s role, I think it was really born out of a church family and church leadership that just wanted to do the right thing, and then realizing that the right thing for Michael is the right thing for any member of our community on the autism spectrum. And then we formalized that when we had this model for US Autism Homes where there was a faith-based partner.

Okay, but unpack that: What does a faith-based partner do? As God’s providence would have it, I worked in a group home for a few months in my early 20s, and that was a life-changing experience for me and prepared me to interact with the autistic community from a slightly more informed position than a lot of people. But the church family, we’re not a social service agency, we’re not psychotherapists, we’re not behavioral specialists; we’re just a church family, so what is our role?

One of the things that Lisa says that really just echoes in my ears over and over again is that we’ve kind of grown beyond needing autism awareness. People know what autism is. You listen to the radio for three hours, you’re going to hear a spot on autism. We had Tom Cruise in Rainman; we have every third car on the highway has an “Autism Speaks” sticker on it. People know, at least on a superficial level, what autism is, and they have a sense for it. What we need to move towards now, not only as a church but as a community, as a nation, is we need to move towards autism acceptance.

So the church’s role is, number one, you’ve got a cadre of people who come to church every Sunday, and they’re mandated by the Gospel to be there for people and especially for people who are vulnerable, and the autistic community has a certain set of vulnerabilities. And so you have this cadre of people who have this philanthropic bent because of their faith. So one thing that the church provides is a little army of volunteers who help with the Luv Michael programming, help with some of the US Autism Homes’ programming, and will help out with pretty much anything.

But what you also have is a bunch of activities. We have our festival, we have our dance group, we have our altar servers, we have our volunteers in the kitchen. We have all these different activities. What we’re implementing and what we’re trying to implement more fully is that the guys and the girls who are part of these programs know that everything we do is open for them. If they want to be a part of it, we’re willing to do what it takes to make them a part of it. When we have an art show, they come and see the art. When we do a Halloween party, they put on their costumes and they come to the Halloween party. So we really want them to be part of our community.

But we also have a big space, and churches tend to be underutilized most of the time. On Sunday, every room in the building gets used. Monday through Friday, on some nights maybe three of the rooms are in use, four of the rooms are in use, but we’ve got eight rooms upstairs, three rooms downstairs, and a big open hall, and the library, and everything else. And so when US Autism Homes or Luv Michael wants to do programming, they know that the space of the church is at their disposal. So that’s another great thing.

And then a third component is that many of the members of the church are on the board of US Autism Homes and have relationships with the residents and the participants just because we’re sharing the same space, going to the same stuff, hanging out together. And that creates something really valuable in terms of other people know what’s going on. I remember when I worked in the group home back in the late ‘90s, it was great that the guys weren’t locked up in a concrete high-rise, and it was great that they were out in the community and that their house was next door to a bunch of neurotypical people’s house, but, by and large, that group home was still in a bubble. We didn’t interact with the neighbors. When the guys went to work, they went to some day-hab place where there were only staff members and people on the autism spectrum.

So part of what this does is it moves us towards kind of true integration, which also creates more transparency for the home, because people at the church know what’s going on in the home. If somebody’s limping, they’re going to say, “Oh, well, why is he limping?” It does create a level of transparency when there’s more community engagement, and that partnership between the church and US Autism Homes increases integration and engagement between the broader community and the autistic community, and really attempts to make the autistic community not a separate community, but just part of our community.

Presv. Melanie: That sounds like an amazing opportunity for any church community, but I would think there would have to be a couple of things: the community itself would have to be open to this, and the leadership would have to set the tone.

Fr. Constantine: Sure. And it takes some training, too. Some of that training… Like I said, it’s interesting with Luv Michael and US Autism Homes that all this grew organically out of Michael’s life in the church. And so in a very informal way, because of Michael’s journey in the church, I think over the first 20 years of Michael’s life, our church community had some priming to be ready to say, “Oh, yeah, we can do this thing.” But another thing, we just started a preliminary conversation with another church in New York, where they’re not talking about building a home and they’re maybe not talking about doing the extent of programs, but they’re saying, “How can we do this?”

I think one of the things that church leadership has to do is they have to say, “Okay, where is my parish at, and what’s the first small step that we could take?”

Lisa was talking about the community service training that they did for the teens. That program is online. You just click through it, and it just takes you through modules, and it teaches you how to be an ally. That’s just super easy, and you don’t have to do it for community service hours; you could provide it, you could… That’s something super easy that every parish in the archdiocese could do. Say, “Hey, you know what? There are people with disabilities in our parish. This is a specific disability, and we want to just encourage everyone: go ahead and click through this module. This will take you 15 minutes, and that 15 minutes will teach you how to be an ally to the autistic person in your life. It’ll allow you to be less hesitant and more ready to embrace.”

What an awesome step that would be! Maybe that’s the only step one parish priest could take, is to send that out on the listserv and encourage people to do it. Maybe you’re not going to build a home, but you’ve got some empty space, and there’s a family, and you could say, “Let’s talk about putting together a program where the guys come once a night and they could do something here, do something cool.” In our church, there are some ministries where the guys get involved right away; there are other ministries where we say, “Okay, how are we going to think about how we’re going to make it so it’s efficacious for them? How are we going to make it so that the people running the thing are going to know how to interact correctly?” So it does take some deliberation and some planning and some discernment, but everybody can take the next step. And then the steps start to accumulate, so the real thing is to figure out: What’s the next step?

Presv. Melanie: Absolutely. Some communities are ready to go, and then others might take a little more time. But I can’t see how any community would not benefit from participating in the fundraiser model. So where can people find that? Is that on the Luv Michael website?

Dr. Liberatore: Yes, you can go directly to the Luv Michael website, and it’s pretty straight-forward there. That’s the fundraising opportunity. They could email me directly: Lisa, l-i-s-a, at luvmichael, l-u-v-m-i-c-h-a-e-l, dot org, and just communicate with me directly. That’s fine, too, if they need some guidance.

Presv. Melanie: It seems like a no-brainer. How many times do our youth groups do spaghetti dinners or that kind of thing? So not just is there a fundraiser going on, but there’s this education that’s happening and awareness that’s being built—well, more than awareness: acceptance being engendered in people.

Dr. Liberatore: Yes, and for churches, the way we’ve expanded the program is we offer an option of collaborative fundraising. So, for instance, our church did this and is very successful, and some others: they participated in the volunteer program, and the individuals, the young people, who started a campaign to raise awareness and raise funds for their church, 50% goes to Luv Michael, 50% goes to the church. And that 50/50 program has been really, really successful. The average money raised is between $12,000 and $20,000 in seven days.

Fr. Constantine: We were the first church to do it. It was kind of like an experiment. We had I think seven families, maybe 13 kids involved. Each kid made a little video, shared it out, said, “Hey, Nouno, look at what we’re doing.” Even that first time, we hadn’t really worked out all the kinks, I think the PTO for the church made something like $8,000 on that.

Dr. Liberatore: Yeah, so they got their—they were able to buy their altar boy robes.

Fr. Constantine: Yeah, and the point isn’t the fundraising; the point is teaching the people to make that step towards embracing the autistic community, learning that it’s okay to say, “Hello,” learning some really basic things about what’s going to make it more likely that you’re going to have a good interaction with an autistic person. But, at the same time, every church needs to raise a little money. You’ve got to keep the lights on; you’ve got to buy the altar boy robes. And this is a super effective thing, where you do both of those things at once.

Presv. Melanie: Yeah, it’s definitely a win-win. Maybe each of you could share some of the specific blessings you’ve seen from this joint partnership.

Dr. Liberatore: Well, the blessing for me as a mom whose son just two years ago was in a what’s called a crisis home, which is a one-to-one support with very little individual life—it’s safe. He was basically keeping a body safe. He has a life now. He has friends. I always tell families: Friendships are priceless. All the money in the world can’t buy what a friend is worth. And so they’re living their best life. Their friends… Every day they’re growing in their level of safety, independence, and joy. I think that is the most important thing for a parent, is to know that if something happens to me, I know Michael’s not going to be out in the streets. I know these parents and my church family is not going to let that happen, and that to me is priceless. That’s the greatest blessing you could have as a parent.

Fr. Constantine: I don’t have enough fingers on my hands or toes on my feet to count the ways that I personally and the way that our church has been blessed. I can enumerate a couple of the big ones. The first one, like Lisa said, Michael has friends. I feel like I have gained so many friends. Michael and I have been friends since he was a baby, but that includes some of his roommates, some of the other people who are in the programming—Jenna, Christian, Eric, Stevie, all these great, wonderful people, whom I never would have met and who just warm my heart. I don’t interact with them a lot. I walk through the church, I’m going to my office, I’ve got 30 things to do. I see the guys in the hall. “Hey, Christian, how are you doing? Oh my gosh, Dimitri, I saw your Instagram post.” A lot of days it’s less than a five-minute interaction, but it’s an interaction that enriches my life so much, just brings me so much joy. I have these friends I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

In terms of our church, it has been transformative in the lives of so many people in our parish, and it’s been transformative for our parish. People always want to see their church relevant, and of course the Gospel is relevant whether we recognize the relevance or not, so I’m not saying that the church needs to become relevant. But people want to see the relevance of the Gospel demonstrated in today’s issues, in today’s world. And this is like a philanthropic opportunity that people just want to jump into. People come every Wednesday, work in the kitchen. It has really invigorated participation in the life of the church for a lot of our members. That’s been an enormous blessing.

And, you know, the other thing… I don’t like to put too much emphasis on this, but a program like this also raises the profile of the church in the broader community. “What’s your church about?” “Oh, we do prayer services.” We know how important that is, but when you say to the accounts supervisor, or when you say to somebody, “We have a program where we’re trying to meet X, Y, and Z needs for the residents in the home. We have a formal partnership with US Autism Homes,” people are always like: “Oh! Your church does that? That is so cool.” So both within our community and in the broader community, it really gets people to think of the church as having a real social impact. And there’s no controversy around it either. Who could argue with it? Doing good stuff for autistic people. It’s awesome.

So it’s both substantially—in our spiritual lives, it’s enriched us. It also has a great effect when the people see the church is doing this work in the broader community.

Presv. Melanie: Absolutely. They will know you are Christians by your love. St. James says, “I will show you my faith by my works,” so they go hand in hand. How about the challenges? What are some of the challenges you faced in running the ministries, and how are you addressing them?

Dr. Liberatore: I would say the challenges are innovating in a space where there’s no blueprint for it, so we’re having to figure things out, make mistakes, correct, pivot. You have to be open to the fact that things are not going to be nice and neat and perfect, and you have to be willing to go through that journey. I like one of the fathers. He told one of another group of parents that were ready to move in, and they were asking all kinds of questions, and he said, “You know, I sense this anxiety, but we just have to hold hands and jump.” We’re going to figure it out. The intentions are good. We’re going to figure things out. So that’s a challenge, dealing with the anxiety of parents who… they’ve been very consumed with the full-time care of their son or daughter, and it’s hard to let go of that.

And I think the second is that there’s not enough money. There’s a deficit in the home level, because the money that they get from the government is not enough, especially if you want to bring a behaviorist in to train staff appropriately in how to work with autism. There’s not enough money in food, in the food budget. So if you’re really—we’re not cherry-picking wealthy families; we’re not cherry-picking low-need individuals. These are clearly individuals who need a lot of support. Then that’s why we have a not-for-profit. Having non-profits are not easy. There’s a lot of worthy charities out there, so we have to always keep aware of that.

I guess those are the two things. I’ve been really, really excited and happy about the community and how warm and embracing they’ve been. I mean, there’ve been a couple of situations where I’ve called Fr. Constantine in to have a coffee and a conversation with somebody who is maybe not so open but that quickly turned around after just sitting with us and meeting the guys and the young ladies, and just educating them about what autism is.

Presv. Melanie: Keeping the communication going.

Dr. Liberatore: Yep.

Presv. Melanie: How about you, Father?

Fr. Constantine: You know, so in the parish where I grew up, I remember that there was a family who had a son with a developmental disability. And I knew this family well, and I was in GOYA with their kids and in the altar with the boys, and it wasn’t until I was 20 years old that I found out that they had a son with a developmental disability. They loved him, he was cared for, but it was also kind of a family secret. So I’ve had a couple of interactions with people in the community that have that kind of old mentality: “Oh, we can’t do this. This is scary. We don’t know how to engage. Is it safe?” So one of the challenges has also been one of the greatest blessings, that, through conversation, through interaction, through exposure, through just making it happen, we’ve seen people’s minds change.

But one of the challenges is: How do you intervene when you see that a person doesn’t have a mindset that’s open to what we’re trying to achieve? I think that’s a challenge that we’ve met in a lot of ways. From my perspective, the other challenges are just garden-variety stuff. How do I make sure that Luv Michael’s not scheduled at the same time that the ladies are baking for the festival? [Laughter] One of the benefits of an underutilized facility is that the people utilizing it can do whatever they want whenever they want, and one of the challenges of really having a vigorous and lively ministry in your church is that it takes a little more foresight, a little more planning. You have to diffuse some conflicts when people are competing over space or attention or funds or whatever else.

But for me, the blessing of this work is that it is challenging.

Presv. Melanie: I like that.

Fr. Constantine: Because the status quo needs to be challenged.

Presv. Melanie: Great point. What are your hopes for growing this ministry? Do you have a vision for what this could look like in years to come?

Dr. Liberatore: I think realistically I would be really thrilled if we could get probably two more homes, so maybe a total of 20 to 24 young people is part of the friendship circle. And then I’d really like us to be a resource to other faith-based communities who want to replicate, probably host a yearly workshop, a couple of days workshop where people could come and see with their supportive clergy person and families. It’s going to take families to do this, and there’s plenty of wonderful families out there that have the energy and the passion to do what we’re doing, and we’re happy to show—not re-invent the wheel. So we’re really trying to document the whole journey.

We have over 60 chapters written about everything from the emotional journey of the family who’s letting go and realizing that it’s very similar to a grieving process in many cases: a lot of anxiety, a lot of denial, a lot of guilt over “okay, I was okay, what was I complaining about” once they see they got a break. And then the acceptance and then the happiness. But you have to go through all of that, angst first. I think we have a lot to share, but it’s not something you can transfer in a 30-minute or a one-hour thing. It takes coming and seeing so you can see it’s a real thing, getting it out of the theory into reality. We just had a group come from Greece actually that connected to us, and it was really helpful to spend the week with us.

Presv. Melanie: That’s awesome.

Fr. Constantine: There are a few things I hope for. I’m going to start with the big one. Historically, you look at—before the ‘60s and ‘70s, people with developmental disabilities, by and large, would just get locked up. Then you had this movement into group home living, which was a massive improvement. The status quo of group home living, while a big improvement over what happened in the past, there’s a lot of room for improvement, too. So my real hope, like my hope of hopes about this program, is that we do it well enough and that it gets enough attention that it becomes one of those moments that changes the thinking and raises the bar, not just for a dozen or 20 people in Southampton, but in our thinking as a people, as a country. That it has some broader impact in that way.

My other hope—I just really would like to see the model replicated. I would like to see the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese as a leader in supporting the autistic community, and I would like to see religious communities of all stripes doing this. I think it’s natural for us, and I think it’s good for us.

Presv. Melanie: Thank you both for all the hard work you’re doing for so many families. I do pray it catches on, catches fire, and inspires some people to come visit and see things they can take back to their communities. Thank you both.