Lara McLachlan, M.Ed

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 more than two decades in community development, planning, strategy, health promotion, integrated care, quality improvement, and learning health systems. 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, accessibility, and population health improvement.

She founded NCF to address a clear systems gap: while neurodivergent adults continue to face significant inequities in employment, healthcare, education, services, and leadership, there remain too few practical, 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, researchers, students, and change-makers to advance 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, increase the visibility and influence of neurodivergent leadership, and create stronger pathways for contribution, participation, and belonging.

Lara’s commitment to this work is rooted in both professional experience and lived experience. As a child, she was often excluded from conventional school environments for ways of learning, communicating, and engaging that were not yet understood through a neurodiversity lens. She found greater belonging in alternative education settings that recognized different ways of thinking and learning. As an adult, she encountered similar barriers in workplaces and systems not designed for neurodivergent people—experiences that sharpened her understanding of how exclusion becomes embedded in everyday structures, policies, expectations, and institutional norms.

Lara created NCF to challenge systemic inequities facing neurodivergent adults and to build stronger pathways for leadership, access, and meaningful participation. Her work is grounded in the belief that neurodivergent people have the capacity, skills, and right to belong—and that systems are stronger when they are designed to recognize and support a wider range of human experience.

Lara holds a Master of Education in Comparative Education, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies, and a Professional Certificate in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion from 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. She has documented her cycling adventures on Instagram at @bikemisty.

A woman with curly red hair wearing a black blazer and light blue collared shirt, smiling at the camera.
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.

May 2026 Update

Telling a story for Mira