We recently applied for the “Disability Inclusion Fund Grant” and thought we’d share our answers to their questions.

Questions

Your response to questions below should be no longer than 350 words each

1. How has your organization’s programming and strategies used an anti-ableist framework? For example, briefly describe work that has evoked responses to and/or challenged ideas of normativity, expanding narrowed individual and collective mindsets, and ignited shifts in the audience or community you work in.
2. In what ways have your organization’s programming and activities built collective power to address ableism? For example, please tell us about the other organizations, groups, communities/collectives that you organize and/or collaborate with. 
3. If your organization is selected to receive this two-year grant, what are some of the key program plans and activities for the next two years? We understand that plans may shift over the course of two years, and would be interested to know the potential direction, planned activities, and future growth of the organization.
4. How will you use funds to build out your organization’s infrastructure, staff growth, and operating capacity?
5. How does your organization measure change? How will your team know progress is happening during this time?  Please briefly describe the kinds of indicators or evidence of progress your team considers for the work that is being done. 
6. Please provide a list of current and prospective funders.
7. Is there anything else you would like us to know?

Disability Inclusion Fund Grant Opportunity!! Accepting Applications Now Through May 29, 2024 | Borealis Philanthropy

Guiding Values

All funding will be aligned with the Disability Inclusion Fund’s guiding values:

Participation: Movement funding is accountable to the disability justice movement. Those most impacted by injustice/exclusion should be involved in strategies to advance justice/inclusion. Question 1

Intersectionality: Acknowledging that disabled people have multiple and intersecting social and political identities that can influence their access and inclusion including race, gender identity, class, and sexual orientation. Question 1

Radical inclusion: Deeply committed to removing barriers and ensuring access so that those most affected by intersecting identities can participate, valuing lived experience.question 1

Leadership of those most impacted: Emphasis is given to organizations led by disabled people of color, queer, gender nonconforming and women with disabilities. question7

Cross-movement solidarity: Intentional focus on collaboration and bridge-building amongst disability justice activists and across movements. question 1

Sustainability: Resources and tools that support the growth of grassroots disabled-led organizations, and expand operational capacities for ongoing movement building.

Disability Inclusion Fund Grant Opportunity!! Accepting Applications Now Through May 29, 2024 | Borealis Philanthropy

1. How has your organization’s programming and strategies used an anti-ableist framework?

“Intentionally liberating oneself from the culturally ingrained and enforced performance of neuronormativity can be thought of as neuroqueering.”

Nick Walker, 2021

The contemporary classroom is a bastion of neuronormativity. Every act in the fight for the right to learn differently can be a neuroqueering act (based on Nick Walker’s Neuroqueer Theory, 2021). We suggest fundamentally neuroqueer learning spaces that enable “freedom of embodiment” and “cognitive liberty” are needed. We need learning facilitators to be ‘space holders’ so children’s bodyminds are allowed to live and learn authentically. Our Cavendish Space is an incubator and catalyst for neuroqueer becoming.

Cavendish learning spaces are based on flexibility, interaction, movement and the role of embodied responsive experiences. We reject the boundaries of traditional classroom settings and look at how they not only restrict embodied experiences but lead to disembodied experiences and harm.

We challenge neuronormative domination and the pathology paradigm. Our conceptions of “Neuroqueer Learning Spaces” and “Cavendish Space” provide educators, healthcare workers, and everyone with a framework for creating spaces that reject neuronormativity and include all bodyminds.

Further, we create Why Sheets that students and parents can use to advocate for themselves against neuronormative practices in education and healthcare. Some of our Why Sheets are:

• Why some neurodivergent people need to wear a hoodie at school
• Why “positive greetings at the door” can be anxious and exclusionary
• Why behaviorist education is ableist education
  

Our courses are responsive and change to meet the needs of our community. Some of our courses are:

• DIY at the Edges: Surviving the Bipartisanship of Behaviorism by Rolling Our Own
• Reframe Disability and Difference
• Enable Dignity: The Accommodations for Natural Human Variation Should Be Mutual
• Neurodiversity and Gender: Queer and Neurodivergent Liberation are Entwined
  

2. In what ways have your organization’s programming and activities built collective power to address ableism?

Stimpunks has been accepted to write two chapters about Neuroqueer Learning Spaces for Nick Walker’s new Neuroqueer anthology alongside Helen Edgar of Autistic Realms. This has provided a great opportunity for cross movement solidarity as we collaborate and participate with other community groups locally and internationally, especially those who are also advocating against the harm caused by neuronormativity and dangerous behaviorist approaches such as ABA and PBS. Together, we create resources and training for those navigating our normative systems.

We have connected with people across the globe with a focus on working with those from marginalised intersections of society with a shared passion for radical inclusivity and decolonsing our education system. This has so far produced our community driven “Neuroqueer Manifesto” and “Neuroqueer Learning Spaces Open Framework and Guidelines”. A growing list of organisations and individuals who are supporting this project is listed at the end of the documents including AutCollab, Learning Together, Heidi Mavir and Thriving Autistic.

We are helping create and expand the autistic rhizome. The autistic rhizome is “a growing and evolving network of autistic communities with no hierarchy or dependence on another’s existence.”

“Each person forms an integral part and is connected by a flow of energy that not only runs through and between individuals and communities but enables new connections to form. It is a place of safety, support and deep understanding.”

This growing network of communities is “an interconnected network of knowledge exchange, and mutual aid and support that have displaced the hierarchical nature of advocate/follower relationships.”

“We are equal in these spaces.”

Quotes are from our ally at Emergent Divergence, David Gray-Hammond.

3. What are some of the key program plans and activities for the next two years?

We stand by our four pillars: Learning Space, Open Research, Mutual Aid, Creator Grants.

Stimpunks Learning Space offers community and space for passion-based, human-centered learning with purpose. Our learners collaborate on distributed, multiage, cross-disciplinary teams with a neurodiverse array of creatives doing work that impacts community. Via equity, access, empathy, and inclusivity, we create anti-ableist space for the neurodivergent and disabled people most ill-served by “empty pedagogy, behaviorism, and the rejection of equity“.

Our emancipatory research efforts focus on the sweet spot of digital sociology, neurodiversity studies, disability studies, and syncretism, in the open. We improve the scientific

experience for the disabled and the neurodivergent by restoring the humanities. We bring voice into empirical constructs and translate voice into academic comprehension.

Staying alive is a lot of work for a disabled person in an ableist society. We provide real help against the onslaught through mutual aid. We believe that direct support to individuals is the most effective approach to alleviating the barriers and challenges that prevent neurodivergent and disabled people from thriving.

We pay creators to create. We buy space to breathe and make. Creativity is a vital force that drives positive change in society. We provide financial support to creators across various fields, including art, advocacy, research, and beyond.
We aim to enable creators to fully immerse themselves in their work. We recognize the importance of investing in the creative process and the impact it can have on communities and individuals.

Over the next two years we plan to:

• Expand our courses and training (online and in-person), focusing on specific subcultures and marginalized groups such as BIPOC/LGBTQUIA+/PMLD
• Expand our capacity and provision for peer support (telephone/online/in-person)
• Develop our Why Sheets – parent and professional self advocacy
• Develop our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces, Cavendish Spaces Project and provide training and further resources to support those who want to move away from harmful, ableist, neuronormative practice in education and healthcare
• Continue to provide accessible and sustainable online learning/art events modeled after the “Conference to Restore Humanity”
  

4. How will you use funds to build out your organization’s infrastructure, staff growth, and operating capacity?

We will hire people from neurodiversity and disability communities to build out our competency network and help us avoid burnout by having more help.

We will extend our software stack to more community members. Our learners connect using 1:1 laptops and indie ed-tech. We give our learners real laptops with real capabilities, and we fill those laptops with assistive tech and tools of the trades. Our learners have access to our organizational subscriptions to software like Setapp, 1Password, Github, Adobe Creative Cloud, and more, allowing them to create using professional tools.

We will increase our admin support and provide more time for much needed warm line training and increased peer support, both online and in person.

We want to build on and utilize our team’s strengths and unique lived experience and position in society. We would like to develop more in-house training and embrace transdisciplinary, omni-directional learning. We have a great and expanding team, mostly consisting of volunteers. We see the potential in each and every one of our community members. We know the valuable learning experiencing each can bring. We believe that good ideas can come from anywhere. We want to optimize this training potential and also be able to pay people for their time and expertise like they deserve.

Funding would also enable us to outsource training providers where needed to fill in gaps of knowledge and experience to ensure we meet the needs of our community.

5. How does your organization measure change?

We measure change through community listening instead of reductionist metrics that measure the surface, badly.

Our grant pipelines are a high touch process. We work with potential grantees to get them monetary aid and help them however else we can, such as making doctor’s appointments and writing advocacy letters. Through this high touch process, we stay relevant to the needs of our community, constantly integrating their feedback into our website, training, and processes. Thematic analysis of feedback drives us.

Impact is seen through growth in website traffic (Website: 450k views May 2023-2024) and our social media engagement across multiple platforms (RSS Feed, Mastodon, Tumblr, Threads, GitHub, Twitter/X, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Bluesky, Discord, and Element communities).

We have received great feedback from professionals and grantees:

“Stimpunks is an essential resource for educators.”

Ira Socol, co-author of Timeless Learning

“Stimpunks is a creative, thriving community that is vital to connecting and learning. We must critically examine our classrooms to build neurodiversity-friendly spaces. Stimpunks gives us the tools to do so.”

Human Restoration Project

“Receiving a Stimpunks creator grant has been life changing. It has ensured the continued creation of the Major Pain podcast for many months, while giving me some flexibility to experiment with advertising the podcast for the first time.”

Jesse Mercury

“The Stimpunks Foundation provided me with so much more than financial support. They gave me a space in a community that I never knew existed for a person like myself. They showed me how I can help create the same sort of community for other artists”

Brett L. Wery

“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.”

Grantee

“You made someone struggling alone feel a little better and less lonely today”.

Grantee

We would love the opportunity to be able to expand on this good work and support more people.

6. Please provide a list of current and prospective funders.

Our current funders are our founders, Ryan and Inna Boren. We receive donations via our website. We have no prospective funders outside those sources.

Funding is urgently needed so we can continue and expand the work we are doing.

7. Is there anything else you would like us to know?

Stimpunks was forged in the quest for survival and inclusion. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit built and led 100% by and for neurodivergent and disabled people. We’ve collectively experienced rare diseases, organ transplants, various cancers, many surgeries and therapies, and lots of ableism and SpEd. We’ve experienced #MedicalAbleism, #MedicalMisogyny, #MedicalRacism, #MedicalTrauma, and #MedicalGaslighting as well as racism and abuse against our LBQTQIA+ communities. We understand chronic pain, chronic illness, and the #NEISvoid “No End In Sight Void”. We know what it’s like to be disabled and different in our systems. We know what it is like to live with barriers and what it means to not fit in and have to forge our own community.

Stimpunks is created by and for neurodivergent and disabled people. We provide mutual aid, creator grants, learning opportunities, human-centered research, and living wages for our community. We presume competence, and we believe in self-determination.

Stimpunks exists for the direct support and mutual aid of neurodivergent and disabled people. We offer a humane approach to help our community thrive.

Our work is driven by lived experience and a passion to change the ableist narrative and dismantle ableism and attitudinal barriers in our policy, society, and culture.

We celebrate and elevate the authentic representation of disabled people in the arts, media, literature, and other creative works. Our website is an encyclopedia of disability and difference full of community art and writing that spans 1000s of pages. Our work is highly regarded. We have great feedback. We are actively moving practices of disability inclusion and disability justice forward. Examples of this work include community organizing, mutual aid, advocacy, and policy work.

We provide real help against the onslaught of neuronormative domination. We operate in the trenches of pluralism. We need funding to continue to do this. We have a busy inbox that is full of need from the most marginalized people in society.

To conclude, we invite you to experience our long form scrollytelling piece called “Take Them Together: Neurodiversity and Disability Justice”.