Neurodiversity: All of the speakers at the Neuroqueer Career Summit are neurodivergent—and not just auDHD. As we’re still accepting applications and don’t have a final list yet, we can’t name specifics, but neurodiversity is our priority.

Race/Nationality: We are committed to ensuring that over half of our speakers are from racialized backgrounds.

Ability: We encourage speaker applications that represent a range of abilities.

Gender + Sexuality: We invite speakers to present through the lens of all their marginalized identities, including their sexual orientation and gender identity if relevant. As a queer-owned company, we primarily advertise through queer-owned channels such as Hey Famm and Everywhere Is Queer, so we’re confident that the speakers and audience will be LGBTQIA+ and community allies.

Transparently, we don’t have projections for the attendance at the inaugural summit event. It’s our hope that by prioritizing diversity in our speakers, partners, and sponsors, the summit will reach a wider and more diverse audience.

From Liora Natania, Owner of CF:

A summit wasn’t even on my radar—Caitlin was the one who first brought the idea to me. They'd helped with and spoken at summits in neurodivergent and queer spaces, but had never seen one built entirely around careers.

And careers are what we're genuinely good at, so the idea of a summit felt like an opportunity to get that message in front of more people. We want to reach people we don't normally reach by joining forces with others who do this work, and to take what we've been doing in smaller workshops and build something bigger.

We've done one-on-one coaching, courses, workshops… this felt like the natural next step. We've just entered our fourth year, and a summit feels like exactly where we're meant to be right now.

Part of what drives the importance of this summit is what I keep running into “out there” in the world. There are plenty of career, HR, and even neurodivergence conferences, but I never found one that actually felt built for queer people, for non-white people, for the full range of us. The fabric of those rooms always looked the same: homogeneous.

And what’s an auDHD queer to do but build the summit I wanted to see?

The other driving factor is honestly my favorite part of running Colorful Futures. Like we've done with the blog, I love finding ways to pay other people for their expertise, give them a platform, and let them get paid to share with our community, so we can all learn from each other. So many of us share some identities but sit at completely different intersections. I see the world through my specific lens, and I know there are people in our community with lived experiences I can't speak to. The summit is a container where all of those voices can come together and serve our people in ways I can't alone. And I get to pay them for it, which is the cherry on top.

Colorful Futures started as a "me" and has become a "we," and so has who we serve. It grew from scrappy one-on-one work, to courses, to workshops with Caitlin, and now to this. The standard career advice out there just isn't built for us. For the people it's for, it's fine. For us, it's hot garbage. The summit is one more way to be of service, and to show there's another way forward.