About the Founder

Meet Alora Young

Alora Young is a writer, educator, curriculum designer, and neurodivergence specialist who believes people learn best when they are given the tools to understand their own minds.

She founded NeuroScouts to create the kind of support she spent much of her life searching for: practical, affirming, intellectually serious spaces where neurodivergent people can study themselves without being treated like problems to solve.

Alora is autistic and has ADHD, dyslexia, dyscalculia, and a deeply nonlinear mind. She knows what it is like to be profoundly capable and still struggle with the ordinary architecture of daily life. She knows that intelligence does not automatically produce executive function, that a person can be articulate without always being able to advocate for themselves, and that many so-called behavioral problems are actually signs of overwhelm, unmet sensory needs, inaccessible environments, or missing support.

That knowledge shapes everything NeuroScouts creates.

The Story Behind NeuroScouts

NeuroScouts began with a simple conviction: neurodivergent people deserve more than instructions to try harder.

They deserve language for what is happening inside them. They deserve tools that account for sensory needs, fluctuating energy, emotional intensity, executive dysfunction, and different ways of processing information. They deserve spaces where curiosity matters more than compliance and support is designed around the person who actually exists.

Alora developed NeuroScouts as a place where neurodivergent children, teenagers, adults, families, and educators could learn how brains, bodies, environments, and expectations interact. Its programs combine accessible neuroscience, creative reflection, self-advocacy, community learning, and practical experimentation.

Instead of asking, “How do we make this person behave more normally?” NeuroScouts asks better questions:

What is this person’s nervous system communicating?

What support is missing?

What part of the environment can be changed?

What becomes possible when people understand themselves?

This is the foundation of Alora’s habitat-hacking philosophy: before blaming the habit, examine the habitat.

A Poet’s Approach to Education

Before Alora built curricula, she built poems.

She is the author of Walking Gentry Home, published by Hogarth Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Her writing and advocacy have been featured by The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, CNN, CBS, NBC, NPR, and TIME. Her work has earned recognition including a starred Kirkus review, a Goodreads Choice Award nomination, Amazon bestseller status, and being named Nashville Scene’s Best Local Book and Debut of the Year.

Alora previously served as the Youth Poet Laureate of the Southern United States, was named a U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts, and has represented the United States as an Arts Envoy.

Poetry taught her that people do not learn through information alone. They learn through rhythm, metaphor, story, emotion, play, repetition, embodiment, and the experience of being recognized. NeuroScouts carries that understanding into every workshop, tool, curriculum, and community space.

Training and Expertise

Alora earned her bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College, where her thesis, Every Lesson Is a Poem: Spoken Word Poetry, Neurodivergence, and the Future of Teaching, explored how creative practice can transform learning for neurodivergent students. She is continuing her graduate education in writing while pursuing advanced study related to social work, public health, neuroscience, and disability-informed education.

Her professional training includes credentials as a Certified Autism Specialist and Board Certified Cognitive Specialist, alongside continuing education in synaptic pharmacology, integrative health and medicine, public health, mental health, psychological first aid, skills for psychological recovery, suicide-prevention intervention, and youth peer support.

She brings together research, lived experience, curriculum development, community practice, and art. She does not believe any one of those forms of knowledge is sufficient by itself. Neurodivergent people deserve support informed by evidence, but they also deserve support informed by listening.

Building What Should Already Exist

Alora’s work is guided by the belief that neurodivergent people are not failed versions of somebody else.

They are people with distinct nervous systems, uneven capacities, specific access needs, and ways of noticing the world that can become powerful when they are understood and supported.

Through NeuroScouts, she is building tools that help people replace shame with information, confusion with language, and forced independence with meaningful access.

The goal is not to produce perfectly regulated, endlessly productive people.

The goal is to help neurodivergent people recognize themselves, advocate for what they need, and build lives they can actually inhabit.

“I created NeuroScouts because understanding your brain should not be a privilege. Nobody should have to spend years believing they are lazy, difficult, or broken when what they actually need is language, support, and a habitat built with them in mind.”

— Alora Young, Founder of NeuroScouts