Corporate partnerships

We have proved the model works. Partnership is what makes it national.

Autistic Girls Network is the UK’s only national, neurodivergent-led charity for autistic girls, women and gender-diverse young people. We reach the young people the system missed, and we see them speak, learn and lead on their own terms.

We are not asking you to fund an experiment. In 2025 we directly supported 667 children, young people and adults, and we have trained more than 3,000 staff across more than 200 schools. All of it is delivered by a core charity team of effectively two full-time people. Demand is not our constraint. Capacity is.

That is what a corporate partner changes.

The problem, in numbers

80 per cent of autistic girls are still undiagnosed at 18
Around 290,000 people are waiting for an autism assessment in England
An estimated 200,000 neurodivergent girls in the UK are out of school, undiagnosed, or in mental health crisis
Autistic women are 13 times more likely to die by suicide than non-autistic women

These girls are not hard to reach. They are in their bedrooms, exactly where the system left them. We know how to reach them because we do it every day.

What your partnership builds: the Sanctuary Network

Our five-year campaign, the Sanctuary Network, takes what we have proved and makes it national. It is a single continuous pathway rather than a set of separate services, and the ambition is simple: we catch her at nine, and we do not let go until she is thriving in work and adult life.

From 20 free face-to-face groups to 50, giving near national coverage across the UK
The Haven, our specialist online school, grown to serve more than 200 full-time learners, with Ofsted accreditation secured
A complete pathway from age nine to employed adult: community, groups, school, mentoring and supported routes into work
AGN Circles, local hubs that hold all three things at once, peer support, fundraising, and a live connection into local employers

The final piece is the one most corporate partners can help with directly, and it is the piece nobody else in this sector is building: what happens to an autistic young woman after school ends.

AGN Circles, and why we support both ends

AGN Circles is the part of our five-year plan we are most excited about, and the part we are least willing to rush.

A Circle will be a local hub doing three things at once. It will be a place autistic young women and adults come for peer support and community, so that growing up does not mean ageing out of everything that helped. It will raise money locally, so that the group in that town is not permanently dependent on a grant decision made somewhere else. And it will build a real relationship with local employers, so that supported work experience, employment and apprenticeships exist for the young people we have spent years supporting.

That third part is where a corporate partner comes in, and it is where we intend to do something differently.

Supported at both ends

Most supported employment schemes support the disabled person. They prepare her, coach her, help her through the interview, and then hand her to an employer who has had no preparation at all and is quietly hoping for the best.

Then it goes wrong, and everyone concludes she could not manage the job. Usually she could. What she could not manage was a manager who gave instructions by implication, an open-plan office nobody thought to ask her about, and an induction delivered entirely out loud.

We will support both ends. The young person, because we have known her for years and we understand what she needs. And the employer, because we train organisations for a living and we are good at it. A placement where the employer has been trained is a placement that lasts.

For the young person: preparation, a named contact, and someone who knows her already and can advocate if something is not working
For the employer: training for the team before she arrives, practical guidance on adjustments, and a person to ring when they are unsure rather than guessing
For both: a relationship that continues past the first week, which is where most placements quietly fail

This is what we are building towards, not what we are running today. If your organisation wants to help build it rather than wait for it to exist, that is exactly the conversation we want to have.

How your company can partner with us

AGN Circles is the part of our five-year plan we are most excited about, and the part we are least willing to rush.

That third part is where a corporate partner comes in, and it is where we intend to do something differently.

Fund the work directly

£330 supports one girl through a year in one of our groups
£5,000 funds an entire group of 15 girls for a year
£13,800 funds a full-time place at The Haven for a year
Named investment opportunities in the Sanctuary Network run from £5,000 to £280,000

Train your own people

Our corporate training is delivered by neurodivergent trainers and is designed for organisations that want to do more than mark Neurodiversity Celebration Week. It makes your workplace genuinely navigable for neurodivergent staff, and the income funds our free family services directly. A training partnership is the rare arrangement where the thing you buy for yourselves also pays for the thing you are supporting.

I thought the session today was just fabulous.

Learning and Development Manager, Manolo Blahnik

Offer what money cannot buy

Work experience and supported employment placements for our young people
Skills your team has and we cannot afford: design, data, legal, technology, HR
Space, equipment, or in-kind support for our groups
Speaking platforms and introductions to other partners

Bring your staff in

Charity of the Year partnerships
Staff fundraising, matched giving and payroll giving
Team places at our events, including the London Landmarks Half Marathon

What it costs, and what it saves

For a finance director, the case is stark. Supporting a girl through a year in one of our groups costs around £330. The same girl, unsupported at 14, can cost the NHS around £100,000 for a single inpatient mental health admission, and an independent special school placement averages £62,000 a year, with some over £200,000.

We are the upstream intervention. Every year a girl spends supported, understood and in education is a year the crisis does not happen.

What it is like to partner with us

What it is like to partner with us
Honest reporting. Regular, plain-spoken updates on what your support has done, including what has been hard
Governance you can trust. A registered charity in England and Wales and in Scotland, seven lived-experience trustees, a clear reserves policy, and accounts published in full
An accredited Living Wage employer. Everyone we pay, including freelancers, is paid above the Living Wage
A trustee-approved Environmental Policy, including a net zero commitment and ethical investment exclusions
Recognition on your terms, including naming opportunities for significant gifts