Read the edited transcript here:

 

Chris Straigis:

Welcome to Scrappy, the podcast about small companies doing big things. I’m your host, Chris Straigis. So, we’re now nearing the end of 2021 and it’s been a little while since we’ve done a new episode, but time has felt somehow distorted recently. I think I can safely say that in many ways, at least comparatively, our world was buzzing along in kind of a cruise control until early last year. COVID was, and still is, a catalyst for some massive transformations. It’s changed us. It’s changed a lot of things, from how we relate to each other, to how we relate to our jobs and even how we relate to our greater global society. I know that many facets of these changes didn’t just pop up out of nowhere– our world, our experience, is ever evolving. But this pandemic was a game changer for our generation. No one, not the very young, not the 20 and 30 somethings, not even the elderly are coming out of this unchanged. And really, I don’t think we’ve even begun to see the true transformation. Everything we’ve experienced over the last year and a half brought about short term and rapid change. It’s the ripples in the water well beyond the original splash that may turn out to be the most fascinating. In other words, how will a change to us change the world?

 

At its core, this is what Scrappy is all about, transformation. It’s about everyday people, just like you and me, doing extraordinary things. Usually finding themselves, forging their destiny from materials they didn’t even know they had, and then watching those ripples roll out in ways they themselves couldn’t even foretell. And so, it is with our guest today. Marie Haas has worked with and touched the hearts of some of the most vulnerable citizens in our society – kids with autism and their families. She began and grew a company in Singapore called Embrace Autism. It was the fusion of science and art, born of a passion to care, connect and communicate. But, that’s not what she set out to do, at least not officially. She actually just wanted to dance, or more specifically explore movement, self-expression, and communication through dance. Little did she know when she started, how connected her ideas would be in a world far from her own, and in a land far from home. Marie’s journey began in Houston, Texas in the early 1990s, her dad was a computer programmer and her mom, a schoolteacher.

 

Marie Haas:

I can remember when I was living in Texas, that my mom would work with both my sister and I at home on lots of educational things. Including this hooked on phonics, which was very popular at the time. I can remember sitting on the floor in the living room doing this hooked on phonics even before we were, you know, in school.

 

Chris:

But an early and devastating shakeup in the family would send her far north in a move to Massachusetts and begin to drive her inward.

 

Marie:

The circumstances through which I moved across the country were traumatic because that was the falling out of my parents’ marriage, and they had just gotten divorced. So, I didn’t want to move to Massachusetts. I didn’t want to leave my friends behind. I didn’t want to leave my cat behind. I was being uprooted from everything that I had previously known. When we were living in Texas, I was taking gymnastics lessons and swimming lessons, but those things were not readily available, at least not close by, where we lived in Massachusetts.

 

However, my aunt owned a dance studio a town over, and so I began taking ballet lessons with her at her studio after school. I think dance really offered me a place where I could express a lot of the things that I wasn’t able to express verbally. So, it was definitely an anchor in that sense. It was an outlet in that sense and gave me something to really focus on. I was able to use dance to really work out all of the complex emotions that I was holding in my body. In that way, there were a lot of times where dance was incredibly healing. It was also in a way a space where I could hide. I wasn’t necessarily having conversations, or being willing to have conversations with people around me about how I felt about what was going on in my life or how it was affecting me. Instead, I just sort of buried it inside of this practice. Dance in many ways, became the way I felt seen in the world.

 

Chris:

What Marie discovered in dance was expression – expression of feelings and emotions that she wasn’t comfortable verbalizing. It was how she talked to the world around her and, more importantly, how she talked to herself. What she couldn’t have understood at the time, however, was that her study of dance as a form of communication for feelings of which she was unable to speak would share a deep parallel in the work she would do in the future after college. But that journey to college and beyond first took another devastating twist, where Marie came face to face with an abrupt end of her dancing life.

 

Marie:

We are rehearsing for a production at the performing arts high school that I went to and in the middle of this rehearsal, I got dropped. I landed pretty squarely on the center of my spine. For what felt like a really long time I couldn’t move, but I was in a lot of pain. I didn’t think that anything was broken. I wasn’t bleeding. And so I drove myself home eventually. And then the next day I went to the hospital to have some x-rays done and it didn’t show that anything was broken or that anything was off, but that I should take it easy. But I didn’t do that. In that particular time of my life, I really believed that part of this practice is pain and that you have to get back up and keep going. And so I pushed myself, to continue rehearsing and continue dancing and to struggle through the injury.

 

As a result, at that performance that we had been preparing for, at the end of a piece, I ended up collapsing and my entire back just gave out. We found out that a bunch of the tissues and ligaments around my spine had been torn and were bleeding, essentially. And at that point, I actually had to stop dancing altogether. I was also told that I probably wouldn’t be able to dance in the same way moving forward or in the future. I was also in the midst of applying to colleges and applied to a lot of colleges that had more conservative dance programs that would ultimately thrust you into the performative world of professional dance. And it sounded like at the time that that really wasn’t going to be an option for me. So that was incredibly heartbreaking and upsetting to feel like the thing that I had been working my entire life for, at least since I was nine or ten, was just going to completely disappear before it had ever come to fruition.

 

Chris:

Years of hard work, the voice she had developed through this art form seemed gone in a flash. Faced with the end of her future in ballet, she once again did what she had to do, she adapted. As the old saying goes, when one door closes, another opens. For Marie, this is where the doors would begin to open.

 

Marie:

At the time, two of my dance teachers at the performing arts school were primarily modern dancers or contemporary dancers. They also had a lot of experience in improvisation and in different types of improvisation. They came to me and said, “Hey, why don’t you take a couple of classes in this? And here are some books…” I worked with them closely and started experimenting with improvisation, and a little bit with composing and making my own dances. They were also floating ideas about different kinds of colleges and places that I could go and study, and Bennington College happened to be one of them. So I started looking into Bennington College and was reading about Susan Sgorbati, who was one of the dance professors there. And she was teaching emergent improvisation, which is the idea of spontaneous composition, or composing in the moment. I think ultimately, the improvisation work became the way in which I could really find catharsis in the process of creation.

 

Chris:

Marie ended up choosing Bennington College in Vermont, after all it was Susan Sgorbati’s program that gave her a new path, so it seemed like a perfect fit. And during her time there, her new chosen style of expression, improvisational dance, would also lead her down another unexpected path… One that would open her eyes to a different, more science-based aspect of communication. This revelation would prove to be key in what was to come.

 

Marie:

In my senior year, I was collaborating with my long-time dance partner and best friend, Emily Climer, on an improvisational duet practice that we call the Recall Form, which is about cultivating empathy in a way that brings us into partnership with one another. And as part of my research outside of the studio, I began reading about how we connect with othersand what’s going on from a neurological perspective. And that’s how I found Marco Iacoboni and his book, Mirroring People and the Science of Empathy. He talks about how mirroring and imitation is the way in which we’re biologically tuned to connect with one another.

 

Chris:

And it’s here that her connection with autism begins.

 

Marie:

One of the things that really struck me in reading his book was, not only a relationship to the work I was doing in dance but that he dedicates an entire chapter to autism in his book. He talks about how some of the scientific research that is emerging around mirroring and imitation would support autism therapies that are utilizing those techniques. So I was like, ‘light bulb moment,’ I’m going to volunteer at this place where volunteers are joining children in their exclusive and repetitive behaviors and activities, and that sounds a lot like mirroring and imitation. And it would make a lot of sense then why that’s such an effective form of building a connection and building a rapport and a relationship. I was being called, in a sense, to move in that direction, and towards that work.

 

Chris:

Marie continued to dance and continued her research into Marco Iacoboni’s work, which would in turn deepen her understanding of its connection to people with autism. She would also meet her future husband, Nick, whose own path would prove pivotal for her as well.

 

Marie:

In the year following my graduation from Bennington college, I started volunteering at the Autism Treatment Center of America, which is the home of the Son-Rise program, the autism program that I’ve been heavily involved in. I was drawn to their program because of its similarities to my work in dance. Their program also focuses on connecting and building relationships with children through what they call joining, which looked to me from the outside very similar to these same forms of shared movement that I was utilizing with my dance partners.  So that’s one of the reasons why I was really drawn to what they were doing. I was also just really intrigued by their curriculum, because they weren’t using the traditional curriculums that other autism therapies were using. They were using a social developmental model that focuses on connecting and building relationships with children, and also works on building their ability to relate to others in the world and to socialize. Working in the Son-Rise Program playroom for me was ultimately no different from dancing and improvising with a partner in the studio.

 

Chris:

There are times, as Marie told me, that the universe just works in mysterious ways. As she begins to explore post-college life, she’s volunteering at the Autism Treatment Center of America and staying involved with Susan Sgorbati’s program. She’s still living near the college and growing roots. She’s also still dating Nick and they’re planning their future together. Then, in early 2010, he’s offered a job in Singapore and he wanted Marie to go with him. This would be the second time in her young life that a move to a far away place would seem to disrupt everything. But then in the fall of that year, our friend, the universe steps in.

 

Marie:

Nick got this job opportunity in Singapore, and at first it seemed like really crazy, like really crazy. I was like, I don’t know if I can move all the way there and not know anybody or not have anything to do. Then, in the fall of 2010, I met a family at the Autism Treatment Center of America who had come all the way from Singapore with their daughter for a Son-Rise Program intensive. And we met in the dining hall there and I said “this might sound crazy, but my boyfriend” (at the time) “just got a job in Singapore and I’m going to be moving to Singapore to join him. Would you be interested in me coming to work with your daughter?”

 

I think they were shocked in somewhat disbelief that that could possibly be happening or that I would eventually show up at their doorstep, but they agreed that they would absolutely love to have me come and volunteer in their home and work with their daughter. So ultimately, that’s what I did. I picked up and packed all my stuff, and I moved all the way around the world. In the first year, I was still dancing, but then that kind of slowly started to become less and less, because I was spending more and more time working with Izzy, who was the little girl that I had met at the Autism Treatment Center of America. I was spending, at that point, five days a week at her home. So, that became really my full-time work. Her mom and I would take turns or shifts in her playroom.

 

And so I would go in for a couple of hours, and then she would go in for a couple of hours every day, Monday through Friday. In a certain way, even though I wasn’t dancing in the studio anymore, I didn’t really lose my dance or my improvisation practice because being with her in that room was really no different. To her, I was her playmate, but for me, she was really my dance partner. Izzy’s mom, Sam, and I met Chris, another mom who was running a Son-Rise Program playroom for her children, and she was very, very connected to the community. She had also been to the Autism Treatment Center of America for training in The Son-Rise Program. Once we connected with her, we began connecting with the community there. In terms of the Son-Rise Program, the community was pretty small. There were a lot of people who were interested and keen to learn about it and wanted help, but as far as I could tell, I was one of maybe a handful of volunteers who were helping these families and working with these children.

 

Chris:

Marie realized that there was a need. There was a large community of families who were in need of a better way to support their children with autism.

 

Marie:

Most of what was offered in Singapore at that time were more traditional forms of ABA, speech, or occupational therapy. There weren’t as many alternative programs, and there certainly weren’t very many home-based, child-centered programs like the Son-Rise Program. At that point, I started getting a lot of requests from other people– “Hey, can you work with my kid?” or “Hey, can you train my volunteers?” And of course, like I said, I was running and working with Izzy five days a week, and so I really didn’t have the bandwidth to do that. But I thought, it seems like there’s a need for this. There’s a community of parents and children who are looking for other ways. I emailed Raun Kaufman, who is the Director of Global Education at the Autism Treatment Center of America. He’s also the author of Autism Breakthrough, which is the book that offers this step-by-step look at running the Son-Rise Program with your children. And I was like, “Hey, I’m here. This is what’s happening. Do you think that you would ever be interested in running a week-long training program in Singapore?” To my surprise and my excitement one afternoon, I got an email saying that they would love to have a conversation about bringing the Son-Rise Program to Singapore.

 

That first conversation was really exciting. It was also incredibly overwhelming because I didn’t really realize what kind of can I was opening up. Suddenly, it was like, okay, in order for this to happen, you have to have an organization. And all the things that go into running a program, and not just a program, but really a not-for-profit. At that point, I was excited, but I also felt really overwhelmed. We knew we were going to need help, and so we reached out to all of these other parents and said, “Hey, we’re going to need volunteers. We’re going to need help.” So we got a small group together at my apartment in Singapore, and we just had a big brainstorming session. To be honest, I actually have no idea who said it, but at a certain point, the name Embrace Autism was floated and everybody loved it.

 

Chris:

And so in 2014, Embrace Autism was born. As it’s said, ‘a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.’ And it was all Marie could do to take that one step at a time.

 

Marie:

So at first, we didn’t really have a long-term vision. We really just thought, okay, we’re going to create this company because we need it in order to partner with the Autism Treatment Center of America, to bring them over here, to teach the program. Then, when it’s over, we’ll dissolve it, right? We weren’t planning to keep it because this was sort of going to be a one-and-done kind of situation. Let’s help educate some people, that was the vision initially. We also didn’t have any funding. So we started by the three of us contributing our own funds with the hopes that we would create and balance a budget that would pay ourselves back at the end of it. This was just sort of a project, a one-time project that we were working on initially.

 

Raun came over, and part of what they offer when they run the Son-Rise Program in other parts of the world, is first a lecture tour with Raun, where Raun comes and speaks. So we set up a series of lectures, a couple in Singapore, and also a couple in Malaysia, right next door, and set up a TV interview and a radio interview, an interview with a local magazine in Singapore. We did all of this by sort of word of mouth and connection. Chris knew somebody here and Sam knew somebody here. So we really started building this larger community of people, and surrounding ourselves with people who were also passionate about this, wanted to be involved and wanted to help. As a result of building and utilizing that community, we became bigger and bigger.

 

By the end of the lecture tour, we had reached over a thousand people between Singapore and Malaysia.  That far exceeded our expectations in terms of how many people were going to show up. Then we ended up having 135 participants registered for the training program that would then happen in May of 2015, and that would be the first program that we ran. We were just in awe and obviously so excited. It just organically grew from that place.

 

Other groups from around Southeast Asia started reaching out to us, and we ended up partnering with a group in the Philippines and a group in Vietnam. It really became much more than we envisioned. It just took on a life of its own. Really that’s in par obviously a testament to our passion for helping spread this thing. But, also I think more than anything, the community was hungry for this and the people just continued to show up and offer help, offer support, and want to grow this thing with us.

 

Chris:

Trauma, relocation, injury–it all helped shape Marie’s young life. The separation of her parents, the move across the country, the near total loss of the one thing that helped her cope, dance. But other natural instincts–drive and persistence and optimism–helped Marie to adapt and achieve more than she thought possible. They helped her find a way to help others. She’s been guided not only by instinct, but also by the chance people she met along the way–Susan Sgorbati, Marco Iacoboni, her husband, Nick, Raun Kaufman, and of course, Izzy, a young girl with autism that would speak for the universe and clear a path for Marie to follow.

 

Marie:

I’m still in touch with Izzy’s family. I’m in touch with her mostly via WhatsApp. She’ll usually WhatsApp me in her evening, which is my morning. She’ll ask me what I’m doing at home today (mostly because of the pandemic). She’s outgrown her need for the Son-Rise Program and is in school, making friends, and thriving in the world. A lot of times I think about, her footprint in the world…in a way, it ended up being bigger than mine in terms of allowing this thing to come to fruition. If I hadn’t met her and moved to Singapore, then none of this ever would have happened. And so my work with her, my relationship with her, my friendship with her has, has been incredibly special for me.

 

Chris:

To learn more about Embrace Autism. You can find them at facebook.com/embraceautism.sg, and you can get more information about the Autism Treatment Center of America and their Son-Rise Program at autismtreatmentcenter.org. For those of you into dance and movement, I’d also encourage you to visit emergentimprovisation.org, to learn more about Marie’s work with Susan Sgorbati. And of course, as always, thanks for listening to Scrappy.