Our son, Nigel, born in 2001, has autism Level 3. This means he is highly dependent on caregivers. He has limited communication skills and as a result also has behavioral issues. One can understand how very frustrating it is not to be able to express oneself.

After Nigel graduated from the school system, we discovered there weren’t any places that would accept him. We wanted to provide a place for him to thrive and moved to a rural area where we can keep farm animals. We currently have chickens, ducks, geese, goats, and ponies. We hope to use the ponies for carriage rides and eventually hope to get calm, big horses that Nigel can ride as a full-sized adult.

It occurred to us that this limited opportunity for people like Nigel isn’t unique to us. There must be dozens, if not hundreds, of other people in our area alone who face a similar dilemma. We then came up with the idea of opening our doors to others Like Nigel and starting a non-profit organization to best serve as many people in our community as possible.

We recruited three of the nicest people we know, who share our values, to put our dream into reality. The first task we needed to accomplish was to come up with a unique name for our organization. One thing Nigel says over and over in his limited vocabulary is “Knock it door” when he is expecting a visitor or someone who will provide him some kind of a social or recreational opportunity. Therefore, we considered the name “Knock It Door” for our organization. The deeper meaning for us was the symbolism of opening our doors to people who have had doors shut in their faces as we had.

We, the five board members, found ourselves abbreviating Knock It Door to KID. So then we considered KID Forever for our organization name since adults like Nigel will be their guardians’ kiddos forever. Then one of our board members suggested spelling it KIDD for the IDD (intellectually and developmentally disabled) population we would be serving. So we finally agreed on KIDD Forever for our organization name.

Forever because we want this organization to last much, much longer than our lifetimes. We hope KIDD Forever will be here for many generations to come. We also hope to inspire others to start similar organizations throughout the world.