Founder

The Compassion Collective was founded by Sher Griffin, a late-discovered neurodivergent thinker, facilitator, and community builder whose work is shaped by lived experience and systems-level inquiry.

Sher’s journey toward this work emerged through years of self-understanding, recovery, and professional practice at the intersections of neurodivergence, social exclusion, and community care. As a late-identified autistic and ADHD individual, Sher came to recognize how many personal and systemic struggles—burnout, misalignment, and disconnection—were not individual failures, but consequences of environments not designed for neurodivergent ways of being.

Alongside this personal reckoning, Sher pursued graduate study in Transformative Social Change at Saybrook University, grounding lived experience in research, ethics, and applied systems thinking. Through this work, a consistent gap became visible: while much research documents the harms of exclusion, far fewer spaces exist that actively cultivate belonging, relational safety, and shared responsibility for neurodivergent adults—especially outside of clinical or crisis-based frameworks.

The Compassion Collective was created to respond to that gap.

Rather than focusing on fixing individuals, TCC centers community as a protective and generative force. It is grounded in the belief that people thrive when they are supported to understand themselves, contribute meaningfully, and belong without masking or coercion.

Sher’s work draws on integrative, practice-based frameworks that bridge theory and lived experience—emphasizing relationship, consent, and adaptability over rigid models. These approaches inform how The Compassion Collective is structured, how decisions are made, and how community care is practiced.

At its core, The Compassion Collective exists to make belonging a lived reality—not an abstract value.
It is a space shaped by those who participate in it, rooted in dignity, mutual care, and the understanding that sustainable change happens together.