Lara McLachlan

A woman with curly red hair and wearing glasses on her head, smiling at the camera, dressed in a black blazer and a blue top, against a plain white background.

May 2026 Update

Telling a story for Mira

Lara McLachlan is the Founder of the Neurodiversity Change Foundation (NCF) and a late-diagnosed AuDHDer whose work bridges lived experience, systems change, and applied leadership across healthcare, community, and social impact contexts.

Lara’s career spans community development, patient advocacy, health promotion, and learning health systems. Over the past decade, she has led and supported initiatives with regional health authorities, family health teams, community health centres, hospitals, and nonprofit organizations, with a focus on patient experience, cross-sector collaboration, equity, and population health improvement.

She founded NCF to address a clear gap: while neurodivergent adults continue to face significant inequities in employment, healthcare, and leadership, there are still too few system-level solutions designed with and for them. Through NCF, Lara is building an interdisciplinary platform that brings together lived-experience leaders, healthcare professionals, employers, and change-makers to advance practical, measurable neuroinclusion.

Her vision is to help create systems that learn, adapt, and improve with neurodivergent people—not around them. This includes advancing approaches that strengthen healthcare access and quality, improve workplace inclusion, and increase the visibility and influence of neurodivergent leadership.

In school, Lara was often suspended from school for “acting like herself,” and found belonging only in alternative education settings that recognized her different ways of learning and thinking. As an adult, she encountered similar barriers in workplaces and systems not designed for neurodivergent people - often losing out on opportunities without knowing why. Those experiences sharpened her understanding of how exclusion becomes embedded in everyday structures—and why lasting change must be led by those who have lived it.

Lara created NCF to challenge systemic inequities facing neurodivergent adults and to build stronger pathways for contribution, leadership, and belonging. Her work is grounded in the belief that neurodivergent people have the capacity, skills and right to belong.

Lara holds a Master of Education in Comparative Education and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies, and a Professional Certificate in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the University of British Columbia.

Outside of work, cycling has long been a major part of Lara’s life. For years, she set a goal of riding 10,000 kilometres and climbing 100,000 metres annually—though increasingly, NCF has become the climb. Lara has documented her cycling adventures on Instagram @bikemisty.

A woman wearing a helmet and black athletic clothes standing next to a mountain bike on a hillside with a scenic view of a valley and forested landscape under a clear blue sky.