Written by Keith Mckenzie, Plus Value Awareness initiative Director

Since June 2020 the original family of awareness projects has recieved a name change to Differences Originals becuause of a damaging stigma caused by a social media trend. See below for details

The Background
Before Plus Value Awareness began this awareness initiative family was previously presented under the brand names Differences & Autism Challenge since the year 2000 and then from 2015 onwards became the fundamental fabric of this awareness initiative family as a special family of projects aimed to challenge conventional attitudes and challenging attitudes.

The TikTok stigma

However, the social media platform TikTok has used the autism challenge name negatively with a trend of horrifying and offensive videos which discriminates & stigmatising against anyone living with the autistic spectrum.

This offensive trend has tarnish this awareness inititaive family and has harmed two decades of hard work of challenging negative attitudes.

Name change

This lead to a serious decision had to be made on the future this special awareness feature. 

However, I refuse to let this shameful stigma ruined two decades of awareness achievements. So a decision was made to distance itself from the autism challenge stigma and in June 2020 this name bacame "Differences Originals ". 

The replacement name is based on a family of projects, campaigns & digital art projects as a different angle of originality and as the fundamental part of the Plus Value Awareness family.