A disability-affirming community for caregivers of neurodivergent and disabled kids.

Built by parents for parents, Care Lab offers steady connection, shared wisdom, live and recorded workshops, and practical resources for navigating caregiving, advocacy, and daily life.

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

Don’t do it alone.

Inside Care Lab, You’ll Find:

Multiple hands holding colorful heart-shaped objects held high, symbolizing support and care, with text promoting experienced parent advocates and facilitators.
Illustration of three diverse parents smiling and talking, with a message about connecting with caregivers who show understanding and compassion.
Illustration of a pocket compass with a white background, text below reading "Trusted Resources," and a description about tools to support navigating school challenges, burnout, parenting concerns, and self-care.
Four diverse people sitting around a table, drinking coffee and chatting, with a small plant in the center, in a bright indoor setting.
Start Your Free Trial

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

Within our affirming, parent-led 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.

Care Lab makes room for what caregiving actually looks like, not what it’s supposed to look like.

Want To Join Us? Here’s how:

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

2. Connect — 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 (with more locations coming soon!)

3. Show up as you are, when you can — Engage live or on your own time, however works for you.

4. Settle in - Ease into a steady, disability-affirming community that has your and your family’s back.

  • 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 Workshops and Gatherings

Alongside community conversation, we gather for live workshops and virtual meet ups, 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”

As part of our ongoing wellbeing workshops, 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, talks about understanding behavior as communication and how simple, supportive routines can reduce stress and create a sense of safety—for kids and for parents.

Why We Built Care Lab

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!

Meet The Team
Start Your Free Two-Week Trial!

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

Don’t do it alone.