A disability-affirming community for parents with neurodivergent and disabled kids.

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True support for caregivers starts here: neurodivergence and disability aren’t problems to fix.

Built by parents for parents, Care Lab offers steady connection, shared wisdom, and practical support for navigating a world not built for our kids and families—so you don’t have to carry it all alone.

Beyond our community, we partner with schools, nonprofits, and employers, and write, speak, and advocate for systems that work with and for our families.

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Inside Care Lab, You’ll Find:

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Care Lab is here to support you, not add another demand.

We understand how much caregivers are navigating and holding every day - and our community platform is designed to support different schedules, energy levels, and access needs. You can connect live when it works for you or engage on your own time.

We welcome you to come as you are, when you can, with whatever it is you are carrying. 

In our affirming community, caregivers bring real questions, share honestly about complex experiences, and get practical support. On any given day, you’ll find us talking through and holding space around:

  • school advocacy, IEPs, and eligibility meetings

  • making sense of evaluations and finding disability-affirming providers

  • navigating relationship strain, exhaustion, grief, perfectionism and fear

  • surviving school break, sharing joy and small wins

  • the daily work of staying connected to ourselves and our kids within a world that treats their access needs as afterthoughts - and treats exhausted caregivers as the ones who need to do better.

Our affirming community is part peer support, part learning space, part exhale.

  • What Members Are Saying

    “Care Lab is such a vital resource because it gives us…a place to connect, support one another…and be the whisper network that all parents of neurodivergent kids need.”

  • What Members Are Saying

    “As a single parent, I was feeling really isolated and alone before I joined the Care Lab Collective - but from the very first meeting, I felt like I could breathe. I felt like I had found my people, people who really get it.”

  • What Members Are Saying

    “Before I found this community, I felt super isolated. That all changed with an invite to the group. I found my people, heard stories of parents who had kids just like mine, got connected with resources, and renewed my confidence enough to trust my gut and advocate for my child.”

  • What Members Are Saying

    "The most helpful thing has been learning from and finding community with other parents."

  • What Members Are Saying

    "What Care Lab Collective does, is allow us to feel like we have resources, and we have supports within an experience that can be very, very isolating. It's a lifeline."

  • What Members Are Saying

    "Care Lab Collective is something that I couldn't have even dreamed up knowing that I needed...it gives me just so much hope and joy - truly - that parents like me, parents who haven't even started this journey yet, parents who have been doing it for a long time, will have these resources."

  • What Members Are Saying

    “...Having a place where I always belong, where I am seen - means absolutely everything.”

Our Community Workshops + Gatherings

Alongside community conversation, we gather for live workshops, virtual meet ups, and in person gatherings, focused on nervous system care, self-compassion, and caregiver sustainability (without guilt or “shoulds”).

Sessions are led by parent-advocates and professionals and grounded in lived experience, trauma-informed care, and disability justice.

Check out a sampling of our past workshops and gatherings below!

“The Power of Parent Advocacy & Inspiring Partnerships”

Care Lab Moderator and Special Education Advocate Nicole Josey talks the importance of building partnerships with schools and community programs and shares advocacy tips with parents.

“Practices for Self-Compassion”

In this session, Chia-Ti Chiu explores tender and fierce self-compassion - and offers busy parents simple mindfulness and body-based practices to support sustainable care.

“Reimagining Social Stories”

In this workshop, Kim Takacs, SLP and Executive Director of Together We Bloom, explores behavior as communication and how simple, supportive routines can reduce stress - for kids and for parents.

Our Story

We built Care Lab to help parents move from feeling isolated or inadequate to feeling supported, resourced, and less alone.

We built the place we need.

We are so glad you’re here—welcome!

We’re Jessica and Rachel: social workers, community builders, and moms of neurodivergent kids. We met as parents first and became friends as we both started getting calls about our children’s differences being framed as deficits—problems to fix rather than kids to support.

Between us, we bring decades of experience supporting caregivers and young people across schools, nonprofits, and community programs.

But Care Lab isn’t about expertise from above. It’s about building the space we wish had existed earlier and which we need for the long haul—grounded in disability justice, held with care, and shaped by parents themselves.

Care Lab exists to make caregiving more collective, more sustainable, and less isolating. If you’re the parent of a neurodivergent or disabled child, teen, or adult, we hope you’ll join us!

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Ready to find your people?

Here’s how to get started:

1. Sign Up. Start your free two-week trial. No credit card required.

2. Plug In. Join our private community on Circle with 24/7 conversations, a workshop library, live virtual events, and in-person meetups for NJ and NYC members (more locations coming soon!)

3. Come as you are. Engage live or on your own time, however works for you.

4. Settle in. Ease into a reliable disability-affirming community that has your back.

Raising neurodivergent and disabled kids in a world that treats their differences as deficits is hard.

Don’t do it alone.

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Start Your Free Trial