Our Story

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The Compassion Collective was founded by Sher Griffin, a neurodivergent researcher, educator, facilitator, and community builder whose work explores the relationship between belonging, identity, systems, and human flourishing.

As a late-identified autistic and ADHD individual, Sher came to recognize that many experiences often framed as personal shortcomings—burnout, chronic misalignment, masking, isolation, and self-doubt—were not simply individual challenges. They were often reflections of environments, institutions, and social expectations that were never designed to support diverse ways of thinking, relating, and being.

This realization sparked a deeper question:

What kinds of environments allow people to belong without having to abandon themselves?

That question became the foundation of both a personal journey and an ongoing body of research.

While pursuing graduate studies in Transformative Social Change at Saybrook University, Sher began exploring how identity, well-being, and participation emerge through the interaction of individuals, relationships, communities, institutions, and culture. This work eventually led to the development of the Cognitive Ecology Model (CEM), a relational framework for understanding how flourishing and distress arise within the environments people inhabit.

Today, as a doctoral researcher in Transformative Social Change, Sher's work continues to investigate identity development, belonging, neurodiversity, and relational approaches to human flourishing. Current research focuses on the experiences of late-identified autistic adults and the processes through which people reconstruct identity, develop coherence, and find new ways of participating in community following recognition.

Across both scholarship and lived experience, a recurring pattern became increasingly visible:

While many systems are designed to identify problems, diagnose deficits, and document exclusion, far fewer are intentionally designed to cultivate belonging. Many neurodivergent adults find themselves navigating environments that require constant adaptation, masking, performance, and self-erasure in order to participate. Support often emerges only in moments of crisis, leaving little space for connection, mutual care, growth, or authentic participation.

The Compassion Collective was created in response to that gap.

Rather than focusing on fixing individuals, The Compassion Collective approaches community itself as a vital ecology of support, learning, and participation. We believe that belonging is not something people must earn through performance or conformity. It emerges when people are able to participate as they are, contribute meaningfully, and build relationships grounded in dignity, curiosity, and mutual respect.

Our work is guided by principles that bridge research and lived experience:

• Relationality
• Compassion
• Consent
• Adaptability
• Systems Awareness
• Mutual Responsibility
• Collective Learning
• Ecological Approaches to Care and Participation

These principles shape not only what we do, but how we do it. They inform our community structures, decision-making processes, gatherings, programs, and relationships with one another.

At its heart, The Compassion Collective exists to make belonging a lived reality rather than an abstract ideal.

It is a community shaped collaboratively by the people who participate in it—rooted in dignity, mutual care, and the understanding that meaningful and sustainable change happens through relationship rather than isolation.

The Compassion Collective is also informed by an evolving body of scholarship exploring belonging, neurodiversity, identity development, systems change, and human flourishing.

Many of the ideas that support this work—including Cognitive Ecology, Synpraxis, Exclusion Feedback Synpraxis (EFS), and emerging research on identity reorganization and relational belonging—continue to be developed through Sher Griffin's academic research and writing.

The community serves as a living bridge between theory and practice. Research helps illuminate the conditions that support belonging and flourishing, while lived experience continually deepens and refines the questions that guide the research itself.

To learn more about the scholarship, frameworks, publications, and ongoing doctoral research that inform The Compassion Collective, visit:

The Ecology of Belonging Research Program

An interdisciplinary research initiative exploring how individuals and communities move from exclusion toward coherence, belonging, and flourishing through relational, ecological, and transformative processes.