Bridging Gaps and Enhancing Support: Stakeholder Perspectives on Optimizing a Transition Program for Autistic Youth and Young Adults

Autistic adolescents and young adults face lower employment, education, and quality of life outcomes as compared to their nonautistic peers (Lawson et al., 2020; Nord et al., 2016). To address these issues, the Stepped Transition to Employment and Postsecondary Education Success (STEPS; White et al., 2017) program was developed to help students successfully transition into adulthood. Given the established effectiveness of STEPS (e.g., White et al., 2021), we sought input from community partners to reduce the gap between mental health and developmental disability support (Laxman et al., 2019; White et al., 2023) and to maximize the program's scalability and accessibility through the use of a community engagement framework. This study examined the perspectives of community stakeholders on different aspects of the program’s development, such as the barriers and facilitators to implementing STEPS and how to make the program more scalable and accessible for families, clinicians, and educators.