Autistic Children and Carers Together began in 2006. 20 years ago, a group of parents of autistic young people got together and decided to do something about the lack of suitable out-of-school activities for autistic children and young people.

With a lot of hard work, these volunteers were able to get the sessions that became Acctivate and Teenage Club up and running. The sessions became popular, recognising how much autism-focused activity groups were needed in Sheffield, with need and demand continuing to increase over the years as autism awareness has grown.

ACCT introduced autism-friendly football coaching as a separate project in 2017, responding to the amount of young people attending Acctivate and Teenage Club who loved football but had found mainstream clubs inaccessible. ACCT Academy has continued as a weekly Friday evening fixture.

We also started offering quarterly Parents’ meetings and family swimming sessions as well as summer trips and a Christmas panto visit.

Recognising the challenge for young people leaving Teenage Club and moving into adulthood, we began offering ACCTing Out sessions, a fortnightly social group for autistic young adults, visiting all sorts of different leisure venues and activities

When Covid-19 hit and in-person activities had to close, we quickly moved to offering online sessions and experimenting with different types of activities, responding to suggestions from the ACCT members related to young people’s special interests. This included Dungeons & Dragons group and Minecraft online clubs then later, as we were able to re-open in-person activities, Drama Club.

Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) and Drama were so popular that they have continued to this day. We’ve expanded our D&D Gaming group, adding a weekly in-person session at Patriot Games as well as our delivering gaming at Acctivate and Teenage Club. Drama has also gone from strength to strength, the young people attending the group deciding on the name InterACCT for this club.

We also revamped our parent-carer meetings as a fortnightly Zoom meeting, providing a supportive space for parent-carers to share knowledge, offer peer support and, when needed, vent!

Our autism-friendly family swimming sessions at Hillsborough became so popular that we made it a fortnightly rather than monthly session. We also added more family trips to our offer including Air Haus and the National Videogame Museum.

As you can see, over the 20 years, the number of activity sessions and the amount of families taking part has grown so much. All of our trustees, staff and volunteers have worked so hard to make ACCT a welcoming and supportive place for autistic young people and families.

The families who are members of ACCT have come together as a vibrant supportive community, helping make suggestions that improve ACCT’s range of activities and supporting ACCT with donations and votes and the word of mouth information sharing that helps other families find out about us and what we do.

Delivering so many ACCT clubs and activities all comes at a cost. The amount we need each year to pay for the staff, rooms and activity costs to keep delivering this wide range of weekly activities is now around £230,000.

We’ve worked really hard behind the scenes on our fundraising and are grateful to have so much support from Sheffield City Council, grant-makers like the National Lottery and of course, members and supporters like you.

We are all so proud of ACCT and what everybody involved has been able to achieve over the past 20 year. We really hope you will consider giving a gift of £20 or whatever you can afford to celebrate ACCT’s 20th anniversary and help stand us in good stead to keep supporting autistic young people and their families for 20 years to come! Thank you!