Jackie Kancir
Executive Director
Jackie Kancir is Executive Director of the National Council on Severe Autism and the mother of a young adult daughter with a monogenic form of severe autism caused by SynGAP1-Related Disorder, alongside Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, severe intellectual disability, and autistic catatonia. Her caregiving spans a lifetime: older sister to a brother diagnosed with PDD-NOS in the 1990s, former spousal caregiver to a Purple Heart Marine, and now one of the nation's leading advocates for improving family caregiver support. The third generation of her family to work in developmental disabilities, she has spent decades in government affairs, public health policy, disability rights, and special education, and serves on the Statewide Planning and Policy Council for the Tennessee Department of Disability and Aging, as Patient Advocacy Director for Cure SynGAP1, and as a member of the board for Saving Wrentham and the Hogan Alliance. A brain tumor survivor, she has lived the need for both appropriate support and self-determination, and her advocacy is grounded in a system that has too often fallen short for her daughter. She and her daughter live in rural west Tennessee on a five-acre homestead, Bunny Egg Acres, raising chickens and bunnies to provide her daughter with meaningful daily activity.