About Us

The Autism Funding Guide and website offer information, education, and support to Autism families so they can access funding for important products, services, therapies, and more items that insurance is not able to cover. Our professional staff with nearly 20 years of experience raising funds and working with families created the guide to share the step-by-step process, tools, and a directory of funding sources with families. Additionally we provide ongoing support and motivation, helping families know they can access these funds. Both the Autism Funding Guide and this website are projects of The Funding Project.

How The Guide Came To Be

Tammy Simmons, the author of theAutism Funding Guide, has a brother, Hal Honeyman, who has been involved with bicycles as a sport, business, and recreation since 1975. He operates The Bike Rack, his family bicycle shop, in the Chicagoland area. When Hal’s son Jacob was born with Cerebral Palsy, Hal’s interest in “adaptive cycling” grew significantly. Hal wanted to find a way for Jacob to join the family when bicycle riding. After Jacob’s needs were met, Hal found specialized bikes for other disabled children and began creating specialized bikes when other bikes were not available or did not exist for that particular disability.

All this work with adaptive bikes led the family to form the non-profit organization Project Mobility in 2002. Project Mobility took the work started by Hal and expanded it further. It built on the things Hal already did, such as taking specialized bikes to places where disabled people can see them and try them. Project Mobility began to raise funds to provide bikes to more children. Today the organization runs four fundraisers each year, as well as supporting families running their own community fundraisers and accessing funds from funding sources via grants.

While the family and associated team members became experts at raising funds, they also recognized they couldn’t possibly meet the needs of all the families with disability and/or Autism. In 2015 Tammy Simmons took her step-by-step process for becoming a funding recipient – information she had been sharing with families one-on-one for years – and compiled it into a book. The Funding Guide for Children with Disabilities was published and has helped thousands of families access free money to get the items they need.

Now, four years later, in 2019, Tammy is proud to release The Autism Funding Guide!

The new book is complete with an updated step-by-step process and a directory of more than 200 funding sources for families with Autism. The Autism Funding Guide will be available in 2019, in both eBook and printed versions!