Building Communities of Crocus

Creating a community that prioritizes those who normally get left behind

Hello to my Learning from their Stories readers! This newsletter marks the beginning of the fifth month of my four-part deep dive series into the lives of people whose stories need to be amplified. I’ve been thrilled to meet so many people who are excited to share their stories with me. Now we need to grow the community of people who read those stories!

I’d love it if you would share this newsletter with a few people in your lives who understand the value of storytelling in growing empathy. And, free subscribers, if you’re able to, please upgrade to paid, as it helps sustain my ability to keep telling these important stories.

Dane Hansel needs a place to live.

The 19-year-old autistic young man loves all things active — things like swimming, bike-riding, and running. His mom, Amy Hansel, says Dane doesn’t like many indoor activities like playing with toys, games, or watching TV; he “likes to be outside, and if he could just be outside and play as long as he wanted, he would be so much happier.”

But Dane has several challenges which make it difficult for him to be in the environment that would make him happiest, doing the activities he needs in order to thrive.

He can’t be outside without a fenced-in yard because, according to his mom, “he’ll elope” — a word used within the autism community to describe people who run away or leave the safety of their surroundings without permission.

Although Dane was diagnosed with autism early in his life after he stopped talking when he was around 2 years old and was in early intervention programs such as Birth-to-3 and then preschool, Amy said “he started having behaviors around the age when kids are wanting to talk more and he started to get aggressive.”

Dane is also nonspeaking, and won’t use the communication devices he’s used in the past. Part of that regression came “when COVID hit and he went downhill very fast.” At the time, Dane was a young teenager, and the change in routine when school shut down threw his world off-kilter. Amy said Dane “would get dysregulated every day and had a lot of challenges.”

Dane has been in and out of behavioral clinics (and hospitals when he’s had to be admitted due to crises), but those are all temporary living situations. What he really needs is a place to live with 24/7 supervision, where he’s free to be active and outside as much as possible without fear that he’ll run away.

Amy has been searching for such a place for years, and when she couldn’t find one suited to Dane’s needs, she decided to build her own.