Enfield, London Jul 19, 2025 (Issuewire.com) - Today, inclusion still tends to stop at the surface. Women. Minorities. Disability. Yet, rarely do we ask: What happens at the intersections? Who gets left out, even in the diversity conversation?
Enter ANNA: the All Neurodivergent Neuroinclusive Alliance, a bold, international platform designed by and for neurodivergent women. Built at the confluence of art, business, lived experience, and policy, ANNA offers a new kind of leadership—one that doesn’t just invite different voices into the room, but centers them.
The Silence Behind the Statistics
We’ve all seen the headlines: “One in five people is neurodivergent.” Yet, what is rarely stated is this: Over 90% of neurodivergent research and media representation is non-female. Neurodivergent women. are largely invisible in research, employment strategies, and leadership spaces.
That’s not just a gap. It’s a systemic erasure of women who think, feel, and communicate differently, women who are multiply marginalized by gender, race, class, disability, or trauma.
For Lisa Garrelts, on the ANNA Board of Directors that erasure is personal.
“I deeply align with ANNA’s mission to uplift autistic women, a community whose insight, resilience, and capability to drive real societal and economic change is often overlooked due to systemic bias around communication and cognition,” she explains.
“My core values are rooted in inclusion, integrity, and collective change. Where some are hardened by adversity, neurodivergent people, especially women, choose kindness, connection, and impact.”
What ANNA Does
Launched by Neurodivergent Synergy, ANNA is more than a campaign. It’s a living, growing platform that combines creative expression, economic empowerment, and community-led advocacy.
Its three mission pillars are clear:
- Create: Host the world’s first digital art exhibition by neurodivergent artists, redefining who gets to create, curate, and be seen.
- Support: Build a global mutual aid and business network for neurodivergent women entrepreneurs.
- Platform: Amplify a worldwide digital collage of stories, essays, and multimedia from women across the neurodivergent spectrum.
This isn’t about charity, it’s about rewriting systems from the inside out.
“ANNA represents the kind of space where lived experience becomes leadership,” Lisa says.
“That’s a vision I support not just with words, but through allyship, action, and strategy.”
Anum Farooq, on the Board of Directors for ANNA firmly believes that “ANNA brings to the fore a growing, significant and marginalised minority of women who perhaps may seem unorthodox, unconventional due to their neurodivergent characteristics, but given the right support systems, are capable of aspirational leadership in both personal and professional capacities, which benefits both societies and communities at a holistic level”
The Business Case Meets the Moral Case
There’s also an economic imperative. Research shows that neurodivergent-inclusive teams can significantly increase productivity, and that doubling autistic employment in the UK could add billions to the economy. But ANNA isn’t just about the numbers.
It’s about correcting historic exclusions. Creating sensory-aware workplaces. Rethinking recruitment pipelines, whilst understanding that traditional markers of success, extroversion, speed, sameness, don’t serve the brilliance of diverse minds.
“We live in a society built around conformity and neurotypical norms,” Lisa explains.
“But in a world facing complex challenges, we need exactly the kind of thinking that doesn’t fit the mould.”
A Different Kind of Power
ANNA is, at its core, about becoming. About making space for the voices that were always here, just rarely given the mic. About turning trauma into transformation, and exclusion into new blueprints.
It’s also an invitation.
To those in business, education, public service, and policy: ANNA invites you to listen, collaborate, and reimagine what inclusion really means. Not as a one-time initiative, but as a long-term shift driven by those who have been too long ignored.
We are not asking for permission. We are creating a future where every mind matters.
To learn more about ANNA or to partner with the movement, visit www.neurodivergentsynergy.com or email info@neurodivergentsynergy.com
Media Contact
Neurodivergent Synergy info@neurodivergentsynergy.com +447428436069 Unit A, 82 James Carter Road http://www.neurodivergentsynergy.com
