On the last Friday morning of October, a residential yard on South Hine Street in Athens will fill with the things that make a fall fair feel like fall: pumpkins, games, maybe a hay bale or two, and a crowd of adults who are often left off the guest list for exactly this kind of afternoon. Make A Way Foundation's Fall Festival, set for 10 a.m. on Friday, October 30, 2026, at the home of Henry and Marsha White at 2431 South Hine Street, is built specifically for special needs adults — not as an accommodation bolted onto a family event, but as the whole point.
The setting is part of the story. Rather than a school gym or a borrowed fellowship hall, the festival is being held at a private home, the kind of place where a person can arrive as a guest instead of a case file. Registration is requested to help organizers plan, but it is not required; the city's calendar listing notes plainly that attendees can register onsite. No price or capacity limit is listed.
That the festival exists at all traces back to one family in Athens and a diagnosis that arrived when their son was young. Stacey Givens co-founded the foundation, and she has described how her son Brooks was diagnosed with autism, and how at four years old the family discovered how powerful sensory therapy was for him.
Convinced that the same thing could help him in class, Stacey Givens set out to get a sensory room into his elementary school. With support from administrators and money from family members, the first room was built in Athens City Schools. Brooks and other students used it, and word spread; administrators from other schools began calling to ask how they had done it. With help from civic organizations and private donors, sensory rooms followed in all four Athens elementary schools, then the intermediate school, middle school and high school.
Make A Way Foundation was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2019, with a mission of providing resources to assist groups of two or more individuals with special needs in a learning or recreational environment — a deliberately broad charge that covers classrooms and festivals alike.
The sensory room work kept growing. By the time Johnson Elementary opened its room, the foundation had built 19 of them, seven in Athens city schools and the rest across Limestone County, according to reporting by WHNT News 19. Givens told the station that the rooms serve children with a range of needs beyond autism — sensory processing disorder, ADD, ADHD and ODD among them — and that the ordinary furniture of childhood, the bright colors and posters and things hanging from the ceiling, can be overstimulating for some students. The rooms are stocked for both directions: a trampoline, spinning wheel, crash mats and a tumbling roll for students who need to burn energy; soothing colors and music, a cocoon swing, and chill sacks with weighted blankets and vests for those who need to retreat. The rooms, the station reported, are funded entirely by donations.
This year's festival carries that tradition forward, but with a difference that matters: it is aimed at adults. Families with special needs children often find themselves with plenty of options for the elementary years and far fewer as their kids become teenagers and then grown-ups. The foundation's stated mission — resources for groups of two or more people with special needs — does not stop at childhood, and neither does the October event.
The foundation has also pushed into the space where disability and emergency response meet, helping sponsor and raise awareness for a Special Needs Yellow Dot program in the community, an effort modeled on the broader Yellow Dot idea of giving first responders medical information about a person before they need it.
For anyone planning to go, the practical details are simple. The festival runs 10 to 11 a.m. on Friday, October 30, 2026, at 2431 South Hine Street in Athens. Organizers ask attendees to register in advance at bit.ly/fallregistrations so they can plan, but onsite registration is welcome. The foundation can be reached at 256-434-1762 or [email protected].
It is a modest hour in a backyard, as local events go. But it is the kind of hour that a mother who once went looking for a quiet room for her son would recognize: a place where the lights, the noise and the crowd are arranged on purpose, so that everyone who walks in has somewhere to belong.