These answers draw in part from “Global Autism Project in a Global Pandemic: Never Waste a Good Crisis” by Cassondra Gayman, M.S., BCBA, Village Autism Center (BehaviorLive), and extend it with peer-reviewed research from our library of 27,900+ ABA research articles. Clinical framing, BACB ethics code references, and cross-links below are synthesized by Behaviorist Book Club.
View the original presentation →The Global Autism Project trains local community members in underserved areas around the world to become competent providers of autism services, with a particular emphasis on developing female leaders. Rather than providing services directly through Western practitioners, the organization focuses on building sustainable local capacity — training people who are already embedded in their communities and who can continue developing and deploying skills after external support is reduced. This model prioritizes generative behavioral repertoires over rote protocol compliance, aiming to produce practitioners who can apply behavioral principles flexibly across the varied situations they encounter.
The pandemic halted in-person autism services across virtually every country where the Global Autism Project operates, disrupting both direct service delivery and the training and mentorship pipelines that the organization's model depends on. Organizations whose capacity-building model relied heavily on periodic in-person intensive training visits from international staff experienced the most severe disruptions, because the core mechanism of service was unavailable. Organizations with strong local leadership and distributed competence were better positioned to maintain some level of service through remote alternatives. The disruption also created an unexpected opportunity to accelerate development of remote training infrastructure that has proven more scalable than anticipated.
The phrase reflects a recognition that crises create environmental conditions that demand behavioral flexibility — they disrupt existing contingencies and require the identification of new reinforcement pathways. Organizations and practitioners who can identify which of the new constraints imposed by a crisis are permanent (and therefore require fundamental adaptation) versus temporary (and therefore warrant waiting) are better positioned to emerge with more effective systems than they had before. Applied to clinical practice, it means treating disruptions as opportunities to test and develop service delivery models that may be more resilient, accessible, or efficient than the ones they replace.
Effective remote staff training includes clearly defined behavioral objectives, active skill practice with performance feedback (which requires video observation or live observation via teleconference rather than just asynchronous materials), sufficient practice repetitions to meet individualized mastery criteria, and explicit strategies for supporting generalization to the natural practice environment. Asynchronous instructional materials — written protocols, recorded videos, or self-paced modules — can increase knowledge but do not reliably produce behavioral skill acquisition on their own. For procedures requiring physical interaction with clients, hybrid models that combine remote instruction with in-person practice and feedback are more effective than purely remote alternatives.
Code 1.07 requires cultural responsiveness — BCBAs engaged in international training must assess whether intervention approaches developed in Western cultural contexts are appropriate in the target community without modification. Code 2.01 requires competence — BCBAs should honestly assess whether they have the cultural, linguistic, and contextual knowledge to serve as effective trainers in a given community. The community's right to self-determination, reflected in the Global Autism Project's local leadership model, is also an ethical value: external practitioners should aim to build independent local capacity rather than create ongoing dependency on outside expertise.
Traditional consultation and training models often position the expert as the holder of specialized knowledge who delivers solutions to less-expert recipients. The empowerment model inverts this relationship by positioning local community members as the primary agents of change, with external trainers serving as facilitators of skill development rather than solution providers. The goal is for local practitioners to develop sufficient understanding of behavioral principles that they can generate their own solutions to novel challenges without ongoing external support. This is distinguished from rote skill training by its focus on generative behavioral flexibility — the capacity to apply principles across contexts.
Service continuity planning involves identifying which client services are highest priority for uninterrupted delivery, which personnel are competent to deliver those services under disruption, what format changes would be required (telehealth, reduced frequency, group formats), what the communication protocol with clients and families will be during a disruption, and what the trigger conditions are for activating the plan. Plans should be documented and reviewed at regular intervals — at minimum annually — and should be tested through tabletop exercises or actual deployment of contingency formats before they are needed urgently. The Global Autism Project's experience suggests that organizations with tested plans fare significantly better in actual disruptions.
The access disparities that characterize autism services globally — along lines of income, geography, language, and race — also exist within the United States. BCBAs can apply the empowerment model domestically by prioritizing caregiver training and competency development, building staff training programs designed to create trainers rather than trained followers, and assessing whether their practice model would be sustainable if external expertise were temporarily unavailable. The commitment to building local capacity rather than maintaining dependency applies equally to the urban community health clinic as to the international partner site.
The emphasis on female leadership reflects both a values commitment to gender equity and a strategic recognition that women frequently hold the primary caregiving, family coordination, and community relational roles most relevant to sustaining autism services at the local level. In many of the communities where the Global Autism Project operates, female practitioners have access to family and community networks that are essential to long-term service sustainability and family engagement. Developing female leaders is therefore not only socially just but strategically effective for building durable service capacity in communities where gender dynamics shape who can reach and support families most effectively.
Sustainability depends on whether the competencies developed through training can be maintained and propagated locally after external support is withdrawn. Short-term training projects that focus on protocol compliance without developing practitioners' conceptual understanding of behavioral principles tend to degrade when external trainers depart and novel situations arise that the protocol does not address. Sustainable capacity-building develops generative repertoires — practitioners who understand why procedures work, not just how to execute them. It also invests in local supervisory and coaching capacity, so that new practitioners can be trained and supported by existing local staff rather than requiring renewed external involvement.
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Global Autism Project in a Global Pandemic: Never Waste a Good Crisis — Cassondra Gayman · 1 BACB Supervision CEUs · $10
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All behavior-analytic intervention is individualized. The information on this page is for educational purposes and does not constitute clinical advice. Treatment decisions should be informed by the best available published research, individualized assessment, and obtained with the informed consent of the client or their legal guardian. Behavior analysts are responsible for practicing within the boundaries of their competence and adhering to the BACB Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts.