“One needs a community of resistance.”

“One of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone.”

—bell hooks

We have a lot of work to do in the USA (and everywhere) to combat what’s coming. Care systems will be attacked. We must build a counterculture of care. Care work makes all other work possible.

We need a counterculture of care. Because the dominant culture just keeps getting colder and deadlier.

@MsKellyMHayes

Putting care—not just care work, but care—at the center of our economy, our politics, is to orient ourselves around our interdependence. We do this not because someone’s work is what makes them worthy. We do it so we all live and live with dignity.

The Year That Broke Care Work | The New Republic

A lot of disabled people in the USA are going to die in the next four years as our care systems are further dismantled. We must create ecologies of care.

We still have access to all our innate collaborative capabilities. If we care to listen to our guts, hearts, and minds, we can (re)learn everything we need for co-creating ecologies of care beyond the human.

The ripples of collaborative niche construction and intersectional solidarity are spreading. More and more small cosmo-local bands of marginalised people are coming together to catalyse intersectional solidarity.

Healing – Resisting internalised ableism | Autistic Collaboration

Next Steps

Here are some next steps for our community at Stimpunks:

• Raise funds.
  • Raise money to direct into the communities we serve.
• Create ecologies of care.
  • Keep people housed, fed, and alive via our aid grants.
  • Help people navigate our care systems.
  • Provide warm lines and peer respite.
• Defend public education.
  • Continue creating why sheets to assist students, parents, and teachers with their advocacy.
  • Run for school board. We have folks contemplating running for election to their local school boards.
  • Go to school board meetings. Be a presence.
  • Tell the story: Free, life-changing, and available to everyone.
• Advance progressive education.
  • Work with Human Restoration Project, PINE, EALA, Autistic Realms, and others to advance progressive education.
  • Advocate for Cavendish Space and Neuroqueer Learning Spaces.
  • Tell the story: We’re raising whole children, not Frankenstein children.
  • Tell the story: Henry Cavendish, Xerox PARC, and Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes.
• Support creators.
  • Grow our creator grants and bring more creators into our Discord community.
  • We will need art and competency networks more than ever.
• Build community.
  • Bring people into our Discord community.
  • Do online events to bring us together and share knowledge.
  • Engage in collaborative niche construction at human scale.
  • Grow the rhizome by connecting with other cosmo-local bands of marginalized people.
  • We will support each other. We will build our own ecologies of care and our own competency networks. We will build communities and network rhizomatically.
• Participate in research.
  • Participatory research that aligns with community priorities and values gives us advocacy ammunition to fight back against regressive practices. Participate in studies.
• Tell stories.
  • Help build a progressive storytelling ecosystem to offer an alternative to the right-wing ecosystem.
  • “The pro-democracy movement needs to build its own funnel, now. It cannot and should not be a mirror image of the right’s funnel. It should be grounded in truth, not lies, and generosity, not closedness. But it needs to be a total media ecology that can meet people at any level of annoyance, curiosity, irritation, gripe, doubt, with any question — and move them toward a more humane and magnanimous view of the world.” —Anand Giridharadas
  • Name the systems of power.
  • Defuse resentment.
• Increase our impact.
  • Consult our Impact page. Consider the things we measure. How can we make those numbers go up?

Doing Damns the Darkness

Doing good things, and the right time, can have a remarkable effect. “Doing Damns the Darkness,” for me is more than a phrase on this blog, it’s a reminder to me that I can take action against anxieties and worries and ‘things that go bump in the day’.

Of Battered Aspect: Doing Damns The Darkness

Let’s organize our lives around love and care.

Help us build a counterculture of care by donating, fundraising, and volunteering.

Let's organize our lives around love and care
Let's write each other letters and call it prayer
Let's congregate in the place that isn't anywhere
At the temple of broken dreams

Temple of Broken Dreams by Ezra Furman