Why One Mother Created a Neurodiverse Community Center (2025)

This is part 3 of a series of a U.N. report about the failures of the Dutch government to provide education for those with intellectual disabilities.

When I first met Tamara in 2019, we were both at the height of our frustrations with Dutch education; watching our children neglected in a system that was supposed to nourish them. We also knew that our two autistic sons were far more capable than what all the care and education providers were telling us. While my son was stuck in a special education school that was unequipped to teach students with autism, Tamara’s son, had already attended eight different schools and, when all failed to educate him, he became one of the 70,000 Dutch "thuiszitters" or uneducable kids sitting at home.

Shortly after meeting Tamara, our paths took different turns. I took my son to the the United States for his education while Tamara worked tirelessly to create a place where her son could grow. She called it Brilliant Future Kids.

Tamara spent the next few years going against the massive, intractable Dutch educational and welfare bureaucracy. The Dutch government gave her two choices, either become a care institution or a school. Private schools were expensive, too expensive for most people in the Netherlands while funding for Dutch public schools came with Byzantine rules, restrictions, and unattainable standardized goals for those with any form of intellectual disability.

Education should be done in school, the regressive logic of the Dutch education system has gone for years. Care, such as speech therapy, social therapy, etc., should be after-school. A full day of school and afternoons of therapy are not only inefficient, but exhausting. I know first-hand that when my son was finally able to combine the education and care, under one roof, at a school in the United States, he blossomed.

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities report recently pushed back against the Dutch’s segregated system, such as education. The report advocated for “strengthen[ing] and expand[ing] comprehensive support programs for children with disabilities, focusing on education, healthcare, and inclusion.” Only as recently as this year, has the Dutch government tepidly begun experimenting with the holistic concept of combining care and education largely in part because of people like Tamara's tireless work.

While there are still no schools in the Netherlands for the intellectually disabled like my son, Brilliant Future Kids, working with higher-functioning kids, is the first step in transitioning care and education into a more holistic approach.

“My son has moved out of the house, is making music in our Lab100, short films and is teaching himself math because he wants to take AI classes,” Tamara said. “We have one kid who passed their state examinations and is now at the University of Amsterdam. And we have another who obtained all his diplomas and is now going to the college for public administration.”

When Tamara and I met years ago, we shared our most negative experiences with caregivers and educators, people with little experience in intellectual disability, but who wielded outsize influence on the future of our children. Years later, the UN report stated that autism awareness was not only lacking in the Netherlands, but worse, professionals and healthcare workers, in general, did not have “sufficient knowledge” of intellectual disabilities. Tamara’s Brilliant Future Kids, instead of focusing on the negative, is designed to build on the positive.

“The kids at Brilliant Future need to build self-confidence,” Tamara told me. “They all have, let's say, an invisible autism. For a very long time, they didn't know they had it themselves. As a result, they feel like absolute losers. So, we focus on their talents first. Education comes along when students are ready for it and want it. Unfortunately, very few people (in the Netherlands) understand that autism is actually just that your senses work differently. That is the biggest problem within the Dutch welfare/education system.”