When Demand Outweighs Resources: Ending withINsight Social

Listen to this blog post

Play media

When I moved to Salisbury and began establishing my business locally, I kept seeing people posting online about struggling to find understanding, accessible support and connection in the area. Rather than assume what people needed, I ran a community survey in January 2025 to find out.

72 people responded. Most were neurodivergent adults themselves, alongside parents and carers of neurodivergent young people. And one finding stood out above everything else:

Building friendships and social connection was the top motivator for seeking support (ahead of overcoming challenges, ahead of managing stress and burnout).

People wanted a space that felt low-pressure, sensory-considerate and genuinely welcoming.

So in April 2025, I started withINsight Social: a regular, neuro-affirming get-together in Salisbury where neurodivergent adults could come together without needing to explain themselves quite so much.

16 months later, more than 200 neurodivergent people have come along. People have chatted, laughed, shared experiences, exchanged information and found people who understand. On some of the harder days, people have also found support. I'm enormously proud of that.

And now I've made the difficult decision to bring withINsight Social to an end. Our final social will take place on Tuesday 1st September 2026.

Growth changed what the group needed

One of the reasons I've been thinking carefully about the future of the community is that it has been growing. That's wonderful – it tells me there's a genuine need for this kind of connection locally. But growth also changes things.

A venue that feels comfortable with 8 to 10 people can feel very different with 20. More people means more conversations happening at once, more background noise and greater demand for physical space. For a community specifically trying to be accessible to neurodivergent people, those things matter.

The irony was becoming difficult to ignore: the more the group grew, the harder it became to create the kind of sensory and social environment I originally wanted it to provide – the very environment people told me they were looking for in that first survey.

There are ways that could be addressed :

• Smaller groups
• More frequent socials
• Different venues
• Additional activities
• Better structures around booking and numbers

Of course, being AuDHD I've thought of all the ways... But all of those options require more resources, not fewer.

There's another part of this story too

withINsight Social has largely been something I've personally held.

There's the visible part: being there on the night.

But there's also liaising with the venue, organising dates, answering messages, welcoming new people, managing bookings for additional activities, thinking about accessibility and safeguarding, navigating challenges when they arise and carrying the overall responsibility for the community. As the group has grown, so has that work and responsibility.

The reality I've had to acknowledge is this:

The demand for withINsight Social now outweighs the resources available to sustain it.

I run withINsight as a small sole-trader business. Many people in the community have told me that they either couldn't afford to pay regularly to attend or wouldn't want a paid membership model. I've listened to that. I don't want to turn something intended to create connection into something that excludes the very people who may benefit from it.

At the same time, running the community without any meaningful income or funding means that the cost – in time, energy and responsibility – falls back onto me. And because I operate as a sole-trader rather than as a charity or community organisation, many of the obvious routes to community and grant funding are difficult to access or unavailable to me.

That leaves a gap: demonstrable community need, but no sustainable structure around the work required to meet it.

Accessibility has to include the person doing the organising

There's another reason I want to be open about this decision. I'm neurodivergent too. I have my own support needs, limits and fluctuating capacity. I've been waiting for my own Access to Work assessment since September 2024. Almost 2 years.

One of the things I've increasingly been reflecting on is how easy it can be, particularly when we care deeply about something, to build accessibility around everyone except ourselves. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to make withINsight Social welcoming, affordable, sensory-aware and supportive for the people attending. But my own access to support and resources hasn't always front of mind with the things I've taken responsibility for.

I don't think sustainability means finding better ways to keep going regardless of the cost. Sometimes sustainability means being willing to recognise when the conditions needed to continue something aren't there.

For me, right now, is one of those times.

The gap IS the point

There's something else this experience has made very visible to me.

What has happened with withINsight Social mirrors the systemic barriers neurodivergent people experience much more widely.

The group grew. The demands grew with it: more organisation, more communication, more responsibility, more sensory consideration, more safeguarding, more capacity. But the resources available to meet those demands didn't grow alongside them. Eventually, the gap became too wide.

Demand outweighed resources.

That feels very familiar. We often talk about neurodivergent people struggling to meet the demands of workplaces, education, family life or society as though the difficulty sits within the individual. But often there's a gap between what someone is being asked to carry and the resources, support, flexibility or accommodations available to them. That gap is where people become overwhelmed. It's where capable people can start to look incapable. It's where something that might have been entirely sustainable under different conditions becomes unsustainable.

And I realise now that I've recreated that same dynamic on a very small scale within my own business.

There's nothing inherently unsustainable about neurodivergent people having a community space in Salisbury. The need is clearly there – people told me so directly, before the group even existed. What is unsustainable is one neurodivergent person providing the infrastructure, administration, emotional labour and responsibility required to hold a growing community without sufficient resources. As mentioned above, this is in part down due to my own needs not being met and/or supported in my business (this is a very real downside of being self-employed).

I alone cannot solve a systemic gap – to be the infrastructure, rather than be supported by it – isn't a solution; it's the problem repeating itself.

I'm not ending withINsight Social because it didn't work. In many ways, I'm ending it because it did work – however the structure around it wasn't able to grow with the need.

When demand exceeds resources, the answer is never for the individual to simply try harder (this is the mistake organisations make time and time again with their staff).

Sometimes we must look at the conditions around us - the environment.

This isn't because the community wasn't needed

If anything, the opposite is true. The survey told me the need was there before withINsight Social began, and the growth of the group has confirmed it: there's a real appetite for informal, low-pressure neurodivergent community in Salisbury. I hope that's something other organisations, funders and people interested in community development take notice of.

There's something important here.

But I no longer as one self-employed person without dedicated funding and infrastructure around me can continue to hold this.

So rather than trying to carry more, reducing what I can offer or continuing until I'm completely depleted, I'm choosing to stop.

Heartfelt thanks

withINsight Social has only existed because people came. People took a chance on walking into a room of strangers. They introduced themselves. They brought fidget toys, rubik's cubes, Nintendo DS consoles and more. They shared tables. They moved seats to accommodate one another. They made room for different communication styles, wheelchairs, sensory needs and ways of being. They told their stories to each other, sometimes for the first time...

The withINsight Community belongs to everyone who has been part of creating it.

Thank you for trusting the space I tried to create and, even more importantly, for helping to create it yourselves.

Our final withINsight Social will take place on Tuesday 1st September 2026.

My wider work through withINsight Coaching will continue, although I'm also beginning to reshape that work so that the way I work is more sustainable and better aligned with my own needs.

If you'd like to stay connected with what comes next, you can join my newsletter for updates: