Disabled- and neurodivergent-led mutual aid and access infrastructure. Free tools, language, and guides for surviving bad systems, building dignity, and living authentically.
Stimpunks
You don’t have to read this site in order. Follow the doorway that fits your moment. Skimming and scrolling are encouraged.
If life feels overwhelming, start with Get Help. You don’t need to explain more than what you need.
We bring the hidden to the front.
We educate for liberation.
We refuse to disappear.
Try the plain version.
This page holds a lot. If you want it short and clear, we made a plain-language version for you.
Same heart. Fewer words.
Our Umbrella
The umbrella is our metaphor — shelter for every kind of bodymind. Access is a process, not a feature.
What We Do
Stimpunks builds accessible infrastructure and public tools that support disabled and neurodivergent people to live with dignity.
We provide mutual aid, creator grants, learning opportunities, human-centered research, and living wages for our community.
Who We Serve
We exist for the direct support and mutual aid of neurodivergent and disabled people.
We exist to build infrastructure that supports disabled and neurodivergent people where other systems fail.
WHO WE ARE
Disabled- and neurodivergent-led.
We speak from inside — not about — neurodivergent and disabled life.
WHAT WE MAKE
Free tools, language, guides.
For surviving bad systems, building dignity, and living authentically.
HOW WE WORK
Design from the edges.
If it doesn’t work for the most excluded, it doesn’t work.
Need Help?
Need support right now? Start here — practical coping resources, access tools, and next steps.
🆘 Crisis Mode
If you’re overwhelmed right now: pick one small next step.
Table of Contents
- Stimpunks
- Try the plain version.
- Our Umbrella
- Need Help?
- What Is Stimpunks?
- Explore Stimpunks
- Stimpunks in a Minute
- Start here if you are…
- What does “Stimpunks” mean?
- When people are allowed to be authentic, outcomes improve.
- Help Us Fund Infrastructure That Systems Ignore
- Mission & Philosophy
- Why?
- For Funders
- Our Lens
- Our Impact
- Testimonials
- Trust & Transparency
- Take a Walk in Our Shoes
What Is Stimpunks?
What is Stimpunks? Stimpunks is a disabled- and neurodivergent-led mutual aid and public education project. We build free language, tools, and access guides that help people survive bad systems, find dignity, and live more authentically.
We are a small, disabled-led nonprofit building infrastructure where systems fail. We operate with limited funding, a small staff, and high demand.
See where the money goes → Expand our Umbrella with a donation →
What people tell us after support:
I can’t believe how incredible y’all are. I’m in tears. This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me like this.
Mutual Aid Grantee (anonymous)
I want to say thank you and tell you you made a big difference in someone’s life today. I can’t stop crying. I’ve never felt understood or seen like this before. I’m desperately looking for community, perspective, support, tools to survive and feel backed into a corner.
Mutual Aid Grantee (anonymous)
Trusted By Disabled and Neurodivergent Communities • Candid Silver Seal • BBB Accountability Aligning
Most Read / Start Here
New here? These are the pages people use most—language, survival tools, and the Stimpunks worldview.
Most Read
Start Here
Pick the doorway that matches what you need today.
Follow what resonates. Keep what helps.
🗺 Tour the Site
Don’t try to read everything. Take the quick orientation.
Explore Stimpunks
Start with who you are or what you need — whether you’re autistic, ADHD, burned out, an educator, or here to help. No wrong door. Pick a doorway, or keep scrolling.
Understand neurodivergent life
Design better environments
Want the words? Use the Glossary Map or browse the full Glossary.
Stimpunks in a Minute
Through Stimpunks Foundation, we:
- Offer financial and mutual aid;
- Hire our community members as consultants;
- Provide a learning space designed for our community;
- Support our community’s open research efforts;
- Coordinate neurodivergent and disabled peer support;
- Document neurodivergent and disabled culture;
- Develop and deliver education based on lived experiences;
- Host events that celebrate neurodivergent and disabled culture;
- Hold space; and
- Provide warm lines and peer respite.
Stimpunks.org is a radically inclusive space led by and for neurodivergent and disabled people. Blending mutual aid, community care, and educational resources, we reimagine learning, working, and living through the lens of neurodiversity, disability justice, and lived experience. Our site offers rich content on neurodivergent design, sensory access, monotropism, and noncompliant pedagogy—centering voices that move through the world differently and advocating for systems rooted in access intimacy, creativity, and interdependence.
We’re here to reduce harm, increase access, and help people live more authentically.
Start here if you are…
Pick what you need right now. No wrong door. Or, keep on scrolling for more about us.
- New here? Get oriented and find your first doorway. → Start Here
- Donors: Fund care infrastructure built by and for disabled and neurodivergent people. → Donate
- Educators: Plain-language frameworks and field guides for your classroom. → Education Pathway
- Healthcare workers: Lived-experience perspectives you won’t find in clinical guidelines. → Healthcare Pathway
- Volunteers & contributors: Flexible, consent-based ways to help build. → Volunteer
- Community: Come as you are. Take what you need. Add what you can. → Join Our Community
- Need help? Mutual aid, creator grants, and practical support. → Get Help
Accountability Is Care → Where the money goes, annual reports, policies.
What does “Stimpunks” mean?
stimming = self-stimulatory movements and expressions that help self-regulation; the repetition of physical movements, sounds, or words, or the repetitive movement of objects
Stimpunks combines “stimming” + “punks” to evoke open and proud stimming, resistance to normalization, and the DIY culture of punk, disabled, and neurodivergent communities. Instead of hiding our stims, we bring them to the front.
Everything that was normally supposed to be hidden was brought to the front.
PUNK SUBCULTURE – WIKIPEDIA
Punk has always been about dragging the truth into the light—showing the wires, the scars, the labor, the mess. It’s about rejecting the lie that systems are neutral and exposing who pays the cost when they pretend to be.
The term “Stimpunk” itself is a fusion of “stimming” and “punk,” symbolizing a proud embrace of behaviors and identities that mainstream culture frequently stigmatizes. By bringing to the forefront what is typically hidden—such as stimming behaviors—Stimpunks fosters an environment where individuals can express themselves without fear of judgment.
That’s what the name “Stimpunks” means to us. Read on for how we bring the hidden to the front by pursuing authenticity, our purest freedom.
When people are allowed to be authentic, outcomes improve.
Authenticity is our purest freedom.
The Journey of Undoing: An open letter to who needs it — SITI Girl Miami
Stimpunks is a neurodivergent- and disabled-led rebellion against systems that demand conformity to grant humanity. We build community, move money directly to people who need it, and create learning and access tools that reject fixing, compliance, and forced normalcy. Grounded in the belief that authenticity is our purest freedom, Stimpunks exists to tear down ableist norms and replace them with care, autonomy, and spaces where no one has to mask to survive.
Stimpunks was truly my first encounter with a community created by and for neurodivergent & disabled people outside the context of schooling, and it changed my intellectual life forever.
It’s a DIY humanizing rebellion.
Nick Covington of Human Restoration Project
So that we may all pursue our purest freedom, we have to challenge the norm and change the narrative around people who are neurodivergent or disabled. Thus, Stimpunks. We don’t “fix” people. We fix systems. We fix access, expectations, and environments.
Fix injustice, not us. Difference isn’t a problem.
Our guiding principle is simple and measurable in impact:
When people are allowed to be authentic, outcomes improve.
The freedom to BE, fully seen AND heard in all my glory is my heart’s deepest request. This is a prayer, self-love letter, a final notice to my inner critic, one more voice in the echo—thank you for witnessing my purest form
.The Journey of Undoing: An open letter to who needs it — SITI Girl Miami
At Stimpunks Foundation, the declaration “Authenticity Is Our Purest Freedom” serves as a guiding principle that underscores our commitment to empowering neurodivergent and disabled individuals. This ethos champions the right to self-expression and the dismantling of societal norms that often marginalize those who diverge from conventional standards.
We reject neuronormativity—the idea that there is one correct way to think, learn, communicate, or exist. Schools, workplaces, and institutions are built around narrow expectations of attention, behavior, productivity, and emotional expression, and anyone who falls outside those lines is pressured to mask, comply, or disappear.
We demand the right to live and learn differently. That means honoring diverse sensory needs, communication styles, learning rhythms, and ways of engaging with the world. It means designing environments that adapt to people instead of forcing people to adapt to systems. Difference is not a deficit to be corrected—it is a reality to be respected and supported.
I’m not broken. Not a broken robot or failed competitor or weirdo whose entire life is pathologized … I’m a reasonable and excellent human being with human limits and gifts. I’m part of variety, not deviation.
A multimodal response in the final class (graduate)
(research participant, as cited in Dymond, 2025a, p. 69)
Kara Dymond: Access, agency, and wellbeing: Possibilities for neurodiversity-affirming classrooms… – YouTube
Help Us Fund Infrastructure That Systems Ignore
We currently fund one Mutual Aid Grant per month. Demand exceeds our budget.
Your support directly expands capacity — more grants, more regulation resources, more public tools built by and for disabled and neurodivergent people.
Our Series
We follow problems all the way through.
Five series of sustained inquiry into broken systems — naming structural failure, documenting who it harms, and building the case for something better.
Mission & Philosophy
These are our guiding documents — the compasses and stars that align us on our mission. Read one, skim all, or bookmark and return.
- 🎯 Mission — resources directly into the hands of neurodivergent and disabled people.
- 🤝 Creed — center the marginalized; design is tested at the edges.
- 🌿 Covenant — an open, welcoming, healthy community.
- 🧭 Philosophy — the compasses and stars that align us.
- 📣 Manifesto — we reject neuronormativity and demand the right to live differently.
- 📋 Tenets — 27 principles, from “Authenticity Is Sacred” to “No One Is Disposable.”
- 🔗 Interdependence — our survival is bound up together.
- 🔬 Design at the Edges — tested where bias and inequality are exposed.
We steer by these compasses. Explore our Framing Documents →
Why?
What’s our motivation? Why do we do what we do?
The help: we provide real help against the onslaught — direct support to individuals is the most effective way to alleviate the barriers that keep neurodivergent and disabled people from thriving.
The need: one in four U.S. adults is disabled, yet our community receives only 2% of grant funding and just 19% of us are employed. The systems built to serve us were built without us.
Our moment of obligation: we rolled our own education and built our own care systems, because the only people who care enough to work for our liberation are us.
For Funders
Funding Stimpunks supports immediate relief and durable cultural change, led by those most affected. We’ve gathered everything funders need in one place.
In one place: a funder brief, a one-page grant narrative, seven reasons your money goes further, answers to the questions funders usually ask, a grant-application crosswalk, and why the giving landscape is shifting toward peer-accountable mutual aid.
Our Lens
Stimpunks’ core ideas as short briefs — how we understand autism, disability, care, and systems differently, grounded in lived experience. Not neutral definitions, but tools for perceiving differently.
Our Impact
- Number of mutual aid grants: 110
- Amount of mutual aid grants: $67,850
- Number of creator grants: 14
- Amount of creator grants: $42,000
- Amount of all grants: $109,850
- Number of web pages published: 1,305
- Number of Google Scholar citations: 65
Testimonials
Stimpunks was truly my first encounter with a community created by and for neurodivergent & disabled people outside the context of schooling, and it changed my intellectual life forever.
Nick Covington of Human Restoration Project
It’s a DIY humanizing rebellion.
A good measure of any movement is in the stories of the people it touches. In this section, community members, grantees, and allies share what Stimpunks has meant to them — from places of liberation and joy to moments of profound connection and belonging. Their voices reflect how our work shows up in real lives, affirming that this is not just a website, but a humanizing rebellion led by and for neurodivergent and disabled people.
As Stimpunks have shown, cultural agency is developed through pedagogy, activism, language, and creative practice, and it has the potential to expand what we think of as the social.
Stenning, Anna. Narrating the Many Autisms: Identity, Agency, Mattering (The Routledge Series Integrating Science and Culture) (p. 193).
As ‘self-consciously subversive bricolage’ (Stimpunks), it paves the way for collective forms of expression that are modular and lively.
Stenning, Anna. Narrating the Many Autisms: Identity, Agency, Mattering (The Routledge Series Integrating Science and Culture) (p. 91).
Organizations such as Stimpunks and AutCollab facilitate connections, between individuals to counter the isolation and perceived burdensomeness that many autistic people experience through dominant social practices.
Stenning, Anna. Narrating the Many Autisms: Identity, Agency, Mattering (The Routledge Series Integrating Science and Culture) (p. 170).
Stimpunks is a great resource if you’re wondering how to shout loudly back at voices telling humans that they fit into convenient ableist labels.
Michael Weingarth, founder of Pillars of Learning and Penelope Education
Their work is expansive, beautiful, liberating.
You made someone struggling alone feel a little better and less lonely today.
Grantee
If y’all care about me, read what @stimpunks is saying.
Liana McCrea
Stimpunks is the best autism resource on the planet.
Matthew the #ActuallyAutistic Coach, Matthew provides important services to neurodivergent people
Their work is the most important stuff out there for autistic adults. There is no more crucial web resource out there than what they are doing. I want everyone to know that.
I honestly don’t think I’ve learned more from anyone else. I am grateful for their generosity in curating & cultivating such an accessible range of resources. Such important work.
Nick Covington of Human Restoration Project
Trust & Transparency
We build in public. Our governance, finances, and impact are documented and accessible.
501(c)(3) Charity
EIN 87-4010796
Annual reports and IRS filings available.
Candid Silver Seal (2026)
Program metrics, leadership data, and financials publicly verified.
Employer Matching Enabled
Registered with Benevity and corporate match platforms.
Open Accountability
Policies, governance, and impact documentation published online.
Take a Walk in Our Shoes
Let us be our authentic selves. Learn more about our community, our journey, and the philosophy we picked up along the way on the next page. Take a walk in our shoes so that you can see, hear, and understand us. Bring the hidden to the front, and witness our realest selves.
Take a Walk in Our Shoes
This powerful animation reveals that the barriers and solutions lie not within the young person, but in the school environment, its ethos and in peer and teacher relationships and attitudes.
Walk in My Shoes – The Donaldson Trust
We have turned classrooms into a hell for neurodivergence. Telling young neurodivergent people struggling to attend school to be more resilient is profoundly inappropriate.
Erin’s experiences shine a light on issues beyond her control that could be resolved by others; by listening and by showing they care. She could not have done more. Telling young autistic people struggling to attend school to be more resilient is profoundly inappropriate, if what you are really asking is for them to keep going under circumstances they should not be asked to endure. We need to change the circumstances.
Walk in My Shoes – The Donaldson Trust
Education Access: We’ve Turned Classrooms Into a Hell for Neurodivergence
The number of autistic young people who stop attending mainstream schools appears to be rising.
Walk in My Shoes – The Donaldson Trust
My research suggests these absent pupils are not rejecting learning but rejecting a setting that makes it impossible for them to learn.
We need to change the circumstances.
We invite you to experience the world as many neurodivergent and disabled people do—not as a thought experiment, but as a reality shaped by design, expectations, and power. These stories, simulations, and reflections show how everyday environments can exhaust, exclude, or harm when they ignore difference. The goal isn’t pity or inspiration. It’s understanding, accountability, and better choices about how we design schools, workplaces, and communities.
Through scrollytelling* — a blend of storytelling, art, and narrative media — you’re encouraged to see, hear, and feel what it means to live beyond the constraints of neuronormativity. It’s a chance to encounter our world richly and intimately, recognizing the full humanity in each voice and perspective shared here.
*Scrollytelling is the fusion of scrolling and storytelling: a way to dynamically tell long-form stories as the user scrolls.