In recent years, there has been a growing call for participatory Autism research (i.e. research that meaningfully involves Autistic people in its design and delivery). Community Partnered Participatory Research is a research methodology that aims to share power between researchers and members of the researched community. There is some precedent for Community Partnered Participatory Research in Autism research, but it is still quite uncommon. At the start of our new research study (called Autism: From Menstruation to Menopause), we created a community council. For the first six meetings, our council was made up of four Autistic community members who were experienced in Autism advocacy and activism and three Autistic researchers. We seven are the authors of this article. In these first six meetings, we made plans for recruiting a larger number of lay community members who would join us later for the rest of the project (8 years in total). In this article, we describe and reflect what it felt like during these first six meetings to be part of a community research council where everybody is Autistic. We discuss how we co-created a safe space, how we helped each other feel valued and how we worked together to support each other's sometimes-differing access needs so that everyone could fully participate. We provide recommendations for how to support Autistic people to lead research on their own terms with their unique insights.
Keywords: action research; autism; community-based participatory research; participatory action research; participatory research; qualitative research.