Catalyst Strategic Consultants

Grain Brain and Ability: Enterprise 4 Good Spent my Saturday guiding [or running after] the Ability Society through a Board Retreat. http://www.abilitysociety.org.
You may not know them but you will. Adrian Bohach and his crew are plowing new ground as social entrepreneurs.
Established to deal with disabilities of special needs people, they have moved beyond the typical “Charity” model. Frustrated by the hampering dynamics of begging and relentless fund raising that clouds the lives of non-profits, the Board resolved to be self sustaining. Now they earn enough revenue from ingenious business to support increasing scope in work with autistic and special needs kids and adults.
They provide services – across several jurisdictions as their model of effective operational control has overtaken other organizations. They are a model which could roll up of inefficient small not for profits who are all struggling under relatively high overhead. It is an icon of change in the sector.
But the revolution has moved on – upstream. By initiating the Alberta debut of the Early Start Denver Intervention, they have been able to stop autism in the majority of kids if they can diagnose and catch them by age 3.
And further on – to research – particularly into a potential basis of brain dysfunction: the dietary habits of our prevalent society. If you’ve read Grain Brain [##] – you will be thinking how a carbohydrate and gluten intensive, sugar fuelled default diet is killing us early and precipitating an epidemic of Alzheimer’s, cancer and, potentially, bringing on autism. Believe me, the spectrum of the conditions impacted by this toxic intake is broad and we are just on the brink of understanding the full extent of the damage being done.
Why are you not living this? Because the commercial interests of our society are totally arrayed against you countering a diet they shove at you with undeniable force and intensity.
In particular some remarkable outcomes have been achieved by getting autistic kids off gluten. One boy who had not communicated with his parents since 2 began talking at 10. Not a cure, but very hopeful and parents of these kids [and the chiller themselves!] could really use some hope.
I have some familiarity as I have dealt with gluten sensitivity for some 8 years.
So the idea that what we eat might just have a great impact on health is far from foreign to me.
Maybe this will get to the source of this disabling set of conditions. Research will tell. And this agency may one of the ways we get there…

Sincerely,
Doug Bouey
Catalyst Strategic Consultants Ltd.