STAR Institute for Sensory Processing

07/06/2026

🎉 This July, we're celebrating Disability Pride Month across Colorado!

Each year, this month honors the 1990 passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) — a landmark civil rights law protecting the rights of people with disabilities to live free from discrimination and participate fully in public life.

We're excited to support the Colorado Disability Opportunity Office (CDOO) as they host the state's first-ever statewide Disability Pride Month celebration, "Thrive Together: Celebrating Disability Pride," on Saturday, July 18, 11am–7pm at Atlantis Community, Inc. in Denver. Free and open to all ages, this event brings Coloradans together — from Durango to Denver and everywhere in between — to:

✨ Celebrate our state and national disability history
🛍️ Support disability-owned businesses
💪 Honor the resilience, creativity, and joy of the disability community
🤝 Strengthen connections across Colorado

Everyone is welcome — join us as we look back with pride and forward with hope! 💜

Each July, Coloradans celebrate Disability Pride Month to honor the original passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, which enshrined the rights of people with disabilities to be protected from discrimination and fully participate in public life. Our community celebrates this la...

06/27/2026

Sensory Overload - Now available for international viewing with Kanopy a library based streaming service.

Occupational Therapy in the media. Watch Dr. Virginia Spielmann, Lola Dada Olley in this award winning documentary from VOX Media.

Nearly 20% of the world is believed to be neurodistinct. And yet, for so many, neurodivergence is still seen as negative, and sensory sensitivities are seen as strange—perceptions based in outdated stereotypes and a fundamental lack of understanding of what these things mean, and the spectrum of how they can manifest. It’s about time to shift those perceptions.

The groundbreaking documentary, SENSORY OVERLOAD, aims to do exactly that, helping to rewrite the narrative around neurodivergence and sensory sensitivity by telling the true stories of individuals who prove that these aren’t deficiencies—they’re just differences. The film follows Dr. Jacob Dent, a dentist and father who pivoted his practice to focus on sensory sensitive care after his son was identified . It also features Lola Dada-Olley, a mother adapting to the needs and preferences of her two neurodivergent children. Finally, it tells the story of Burnett Au, a young autistic adult who has struggled for years to find a work environment with sensory sensitive conditions and openness to neurodivergence.

Filmed over the course of a year, the film weaves the stories of our heroes together with voices from experts and advocates in neurodivergence, healthcare, and policy, like Dr Virginia Spielmann and Jonathan Martinez. It follows each of our heroes as they navigate the ups and downs of their everyday lives in a world that wasn’t designed for neurodiversity. We’ll watch them encounter very real hurdles—prejudice from strangers, workplace difficulties, interpersonal mismatches, and lack of access to medical care—with resolve, resilience, and an eye towards the ways things can and should change. Through their stories, viewers will gain a better understanding of how all brains function. We’ll witness the ways neurodiversity can be a superpower, how it exists on a spectrum that touches so many of us, and how a deeper understanding of neurodiversity can help to create a more inclusive—and wonderfully sensitive—world for everyone. This isn’t just a film about the neurodivergent spectrum, it’s about the spectrum of human experience.

Produced by the team at Vox, Presented by Haleon and Sensodyne US, Directed by the amazing Kiana Moore. 📺 Streaming alongside our debut on Hulu. Also sponsored by KultureCity

(2025, 56min, VOX Media)
Closed captions available
https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/justwatch-15480466?utm_source=justwatch

06/23/2026

Summer is the perfect time to invest in foundational learning — and our Foundations of Development Course is designed exactly for that.

Across 12 hours of live, virtual sessions (two hours each Tuesday evening, June 30 through August 4), you'll build a deep understanding of the three core pillars of human development:

🧠 Sensory processing — how the nervous system registers and responds to the world around us
⚖️ Regulation — our capacity to manage body and mind well enough to learn and participate
🤝 Relationship — the attuned, safe connections that make growth possible

Spaced across the summer months, the pacing gives you time to absorb, reflect, and begin applying what you're learning — without the overwhelm of an intensive format.

Whether you're an OT, SLP, PT, educator, or student — this is the starting point.

📅 Tuesdays, June 30 – August 4 · 5:00–7:00pm MT
💻 Live virtual · $289 · AOTA & ASHA CEUs available
📜 Certificate of Attendance included
🔗 https://bit.ly/star_foundations

06/21/2026

Happy Father's Day to every incredible dad! 💙 Your curiosity, consistency, and commitment are shaping your child's world in the most powerful ways. The questions you ask, the tools you learn, and the moments you show up — they all add up to something extraordinary.

Your child is thriving because you are in their corner. That's not a small thing. That's everything.
Happy Father's Day. 🌟

06/10/2026

06/10/2026

The Summit Promise
Participants leave differently wired, thriving with three things: 1. Clarity about what Neuroaffirming practice actually requires, at the level of self, relationship, and system.
2. Tools, practical framework and strategies drawn from application labs that work in the real world.
3. Alignment a renewed sense of professional purpose, and direction grounded in approaches that honor, complexity, dignity, and genuine human difference.

06/09/2026

How Corporate ABA Clinics Are Destroying Children's Nervous Systems (And what to do instead) A provider called The Perfect Child billed a New Jersey family more than $900,000 for a few months of in-home autism therapy. The family had been told they would not have to pay anything out of pocket. [wsj....

06/09/2026

When a child falls asleep during therapy, that should be information.

Their nervous system is telling you something important.

The New York Times recently reported that an ABA clinic chain had a policy of waking children after 7 minutes of sleep to resume therapy. Almost at the same time The Wall Street Journal found another provider billing a single family $900,000 for a few months of in-home autism therapy.

These findings point to something structural, what happens when care delivery gets organized around billable hours rather than what a developing nervous system actually needs.

Dr. Virginia Spielmann breaks down the neuroscience of what high-intensity behavioral programs cost children physiologically, and what the evidence supports instead.

Worth reading, worth sharing.

How Corporate ABA Clinics Are Destroying Children's Nervous Systems (And what to do instead) A provider called The Perfect Child billed a New Jersey family more than $900,000 for a few months of in-home autism therapy. The family had been told they would not have to pay anything out of pocket. [wsj....