Task:

Develop a new an innovative program that supports Oregon State’s priority population by Oregon’s Senate Bill with an aim to prepare Oregon’s technology workforce development.

Overview

FuseChange in collaboration with Liminal Labs and NTEN, led the designed new and innovative program that started in the Portland Metro Area called The Open Source Fellowship.

The program addresses a striking reality: 30–40% of unemployed individuals are neurodivergent. This population is often highly capable, frequently possessing unique strengths that empower their teams to innovate. The challenge begins in the job search when both employers and hiring committees don’t fully understand neurodifferences. Once hired, sustaining employment can be difficult for neurodivergent individuals who are adapting to workplace environments that were not neccessarily designed for a variety of minds.

The core insight is: this represents untapped human capital — talented, motivated people who are ready to work.

Neurodiverse persons are valuable!

“Many people with neurological conditions such as autism spectrum disorder and dyslexia have extraordinary skills, including those in pattern recognition, memory, and mathematics. Yet they often struggle to fit the profiles sought by employers.” – Harvard Business School, 2017

Middlebury’s Guide on Business for Neurodiversity highlights the business case for neuroinclusive environments, citing that disability-inclusive companies see up to 28% higher revenues. Neurodiverse talent introduces fresh new perspectives, fostering creativity and problem-solving that is beneficial for tackling complex business challenges.

Program Design:

FuseChange led the design of a one-year Open Source Fellowship in which five fellows build open-source technology for a nonprofit in their community. The program is rooted in lived experience, designed by and for neurodivergent persons working in tech.

The program was built on a key observation: some of the most talented technology professionals identify as neurodivergent, yet many are working in unrelated fields or are unemployed. The Fellowship was designed to bring these individuals into careers they love, while simultaneously helping employers learn how to design neuroinclusive workplaces.

Community conversations proved invaluable during program design. We learned that employers were not necessarily seeking technical skills alone. They needed candidates with strong collaboration skills who could quickly integrate into an agile development process. This insight was reinforced through conversations with Collab Lab, a successful Portland-based volunteer initiative that has taught hundreds of engineers how to work collaboratively in agile environments.

The program is structured around three core components:

1. Hands-on work experience for five neurodivergent fellows
2. Community events that advance neuroinclusive learning
3. Building open-source technology to support local nonprofits

Open Source, Community & Nonprofits:

A defining feature of this program is its circular, community-centric framework. Rather than building technology in isolation, we reached out to nonprofits across the Portland Metro Area to ask: what do you need to better serve our community? This approach ensured that the technology built would be genuinely useful and would ultimately make a real impact on local people.

The other big factor for this program is creating a circular community-centric framework. Rather than building any solution, we reached outo the Portland Metro community nonprofits asking what they need to support our community? Doing so could build a technology that we know will be used and ultimately make in impact on local people.

Going open source enables the same technology to be used by other nonprofits anywhere in the coutry or world. The tech also can become a glue that weaves collaboration into collective impact. It paves way for hundreds of nonprofits working on a similar problem, now have technology they can share. They can pool resources and build out new features benefitting the collective sharing the same solution.

We delivered:

1. Wrote a winning $667k grant proposal.
2. Established 8 local collaborating partners supporting the program.
3. Housed the grant in NTEN to maximize the opportunity.
4. Hired 5 Fellows
5. Program setup