We applied for a grant to fund our Why Sheets project.

Families are asked to justify what should be obvious. Why Sheets make the case for you — free, editable, open-licensed, and ready for the room.

Why Sheets – Stimpunks Foundation

Families navigating schools, hospitals, and systems are constantly asked to justify what should be obvious.

Why does my child need that support? Why isn’t this working? Why are you doing it that way? The answers exist — in research, in law, in lived experience — but finding them, organizing them, and presenting them concisely in a meeting or appointment is exhausting work. Why Sheets do that work for you. Free, editable, and open-licensed, they put the evidence in your hands in a format you can actually use.

Advocates are always expected to explain themselves. The status quo doesn’t need justification — it just gets assumed. That asymmetry is a form of power, and it wears families down. Why Sheets push back. Each one concisely makes the case for a practice, a right, or an approach that families and educators shouldn’t have to defend alone — but often do. Download them, edit them, share them without restriction.

Why Sheets – Stimpunks Foundation

We like to share our grant applications as form of transparency and showing our work. Below is what we submitted for a grant to fund the expansion of our Why Sheets to better serve folks with intellectual disabilities.

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Questions

Please describe your project in 2-3 sentences.

“Why Sheets” are free, editable, open-licensed documents that help students, families, and caregivers advocate for themselves in schools, healthcare settings, and other systems. Each sheet concisely makes the case for a practice, right, or approach that shouldn’t require justification but often does. They are designed to put the research and reasoning families need directly in their hands, in a format they can bring into a meeting and actually use.

Read more about why sheets and see examples here:

Why Sheets

Why is this project important to you?

Advocates are always expected to explain themselves while the status quo gets assumed. That asymmetry is exhausting and a form of power that wears families down. Families navigating IEPs, medical appointments, and hostile systems often have the knowledge and lived experience to know something is wrong, but lack a concise, evidence-backed way to make that case in the room where decisions are made. Why Sheets matter because they do that organizing work in advance, putting research, law, and lived experience into a format families can actually use. They’re free, editable, and open-licensed, meaning anyone can take them, adapt them, and share them without restriction.

If this project gets finished, who does it help in your community?

Why Sheets are designed to help students, families, and caregivers. This project specifically expands their scope to further serve children with Intellectual Disabilities and their families, across education, healthcare, and legal/systems contexts.

Are you or your group applying alone or with collaborators?

Stimpunks Foundation is applying alone, though collaboration is built into how we work. We default to open, which means people and organizations outside our core community regularly contribute to and build on what we create. For education-focused work specifically, we often collaborate with Human Restoration Project, a nonprofit of progressive educators whose values align closely with ours. Any Why Sheets touching education practice would naturally draw on those relationships, as they have in our broader work together.

What other organizations or individuals are you working with on this project? (If you are applying with a Collaborator, this question is asking about connections outside of that collaboration.) Who are you working with?

While Stimpunks Foundation is the sole applicant, this project draws on a rich network of relationships across the Autistic rhizome. The rhizome is an interconnected web of autistic-led and neurodivergent communities, advocates, and organizations who share knowledge, amplify each other’s work, and contribute to a growing commons of neurodivergent self-advocacy resources. This includes community members and allies connected to organizations like Thriving Autistic, Human Restoration Project, and NeuroHub Community, among others. Because Why Sheets are open-licensed and developed in public, these relationships translate directly into the work without requiring formal collaboration agreements. The Autistic rhizome is less a list of partners than a living ecosystem we are both part of and in service to.

Who else is doing work on this subject in your city, county, or state? What relationship do you have with them?

Human Restoration Project does related work at the national level, creating accessible primers and resources on issues important to students and their families in education contexts. They are the closest organizational parallel to what Why Sheets do. However, we are not aware of organizations doing this specific kind of work — free, open-licensed, concise advocacy documents designed for neurodivergent and disabled children and their families across education, healthcare, and systems — at the local, county, or state level. That gap is part of what makes this project valuable. Families navigating these systems need tools that exist, are accessible, and are built with their actual situations in mind.

How does your organization build relationships with communities you are not a part of?

Stimpunks defaults to open and works in public, which naturally invites relationship across community lines. People find the work, contribute to it, and connect with us through shared values rather than formal outreach campaigns. Our CC0 licensing means communities we aren’t part of can take what we build and make it their own without needing a relationship with us at all, which is itself a form of respect for their autonomy. Where we do build active relationships, we do so through genuine alignment around shared goals rather than extractive partnership. We are also honest about the limits of our perspective. Why Sheets covering Intellectual Disabilities, for example, are being developed with awareness that ID communities have their own self-advocacy traditions, organizations, and voices, and that doing this work well means listening to and centering those voices, not speaking for communities we don’t represent.

What other work have you done in the past or right now that is similar to this project?

Why Sheets are an existing Stimpunks project that this grant would allow us to invest in more deliberately. We have already published Why Sheets on topics including Neuroqueer Learning Spaces, Behaviorism, Alternatives to ABA, Eye Contact, School Dress Codes, and Cavendish Space, among others. These are all free, CC0-licensed, and available on both the Stimpunks website and GitHub. The project has an established format, an open contribution process, a signature system for community endorsement, and an existing audience of families and educators who use and share the sheets. This grant represents an opportunity to expand that foundation into new territory rather than building something from scratch. The infrastructure, the values, and the community are already there.

What experience do you have with self advocacy work?

Ryan has been doing self-advocacy work in education and healthcare for over 15 years, beginning when his children and he himself were diagnosed as Autistic. That lived experience of navigating IEPs, medical appointments, and systems as both a disabled person and a parent of disabled children is the foundation the Why Sheets project is built on. Stimpunks Foundation has been operating since 2021, translating that personal advocacy experience into organizational infrastructure: mutual aid, open educational resources, learning pathways, and tools like Why Sheets that put advocacy capacity directly in the hands of families. The work has always been personal before it was organizational, which is why it tends to resonate with the families it serves.

What challenges do you think you may deal with on the way to your goal?

This project is well-within our wheelhouse and achievable. That said, here are some common obstacles:

The communities we serve are often the most time-poor and energy-depleted. The families who most need Why Sheets may have the least capacity to find them, adapt them, and deploy them effectively. Getting resources into the right hands at the right moment is a persistent challenge for any open-access project.

Creating Why Sheets that are genuinely useful across diverse contexts is hard. A sheet that works for a family in a well-resourced suburban school district may land differently for a family in an under-resourced rural district or one navigating systems in a second language. Accessibility of the sheets themselves is ongoing work that requires time and expertise.

The topics Why Sheets cover are often contested precisely because they challenge institutional power. Schools, healthcare providers, and systems don’t always welcome families arriving with evidence-backed advocacy tools. That friction is the point, but it also means families may face pushback that a sheet alone can’t resolve.

Finally, sustaining open community projects is structurally hard. Contributions are uneven, momentum is hard to maintain without dedicated resources, and the labor of coordination often falls on the people already doing the most. This grant represents an opportunity to build more deliberately.

How will your project make life better for the groups you checked a box for?

Why Sheets reduce the burden that systems place on the people least resourced to bear it. Families who are already stretched thin shouldn’t also have to become researchers and rhetoricians every time they walk into an IEP meeting or a doctor’s office. By putting concise, credible, ready-to-use advocacy tools directly in their hands, Why Sheets help level a playing field that is systematically tilted against neurodivergent and disabled people and their families. For children with Intellectual Disabilities specifically, they can be the difference between a child being presumed incompetent and warehoused in a segregated setting versus being genuinely included, supported, and given the chance to grow. At their best, Why Sheets don’t just help families win individual arguments, they help shift what feels arguable in the first place.

How are people from these communities included in making choices and doing work for your project?

Stimpunks is built by and for neurodivergent and disabled people, so community inclusion is our foundation. Why Sheets are developed in public, licensed CC0, and hosted openly on GitHub and the open web, meaning anyone from the communities we serve can contribute, adapt, and improve them without asking permission. Our broader community includes neurodivergent and disabled people from across the Autistic rhizome, including folks connected to organizations like Thriving Autistic, Human Restoration Project, and NeuroHub Community, who bring their lived experience and organizational knowledge into the work. The open signature process also invites parents, carers, and professionals to formally endorse sheets, further grounding them in community voice and credibility. Defaulting to open means that the people these sheets serve should have real power over what they say and how they grow.

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SMARTIE Goals

Please describe your project as a SMARTIE goal.

Strategic: What do you want your project to do?

Expand Why Sheets to cover Intellectual and Developmental Disability across education, healthcare, and legal/systems contexts.

Measurable: How will you know you are making progress toward your goal?

Number of: sheets published, signatures gathered, page views, downloads or GitHub forks, contributors engaged.

And, of course, and most importantly, feedback from those using our resources. We constantly integrate feedback into our iterative processes.

For more on how we measure:

Charting Impact

Performance & Effectiveness Assessment Policy

Achievable: What makes you feel like this project is something you can actually do? Do you know all the resources you need to make your project happen?

We have already published Why Sheets on topics including Neuroqueer Learning Spaces, Behaviorism, Alternatives to ABA, Eye Contact, School Dress Codes, and Cavendish Space, among others. These are all free, CC0-licensed, and available on both the Stimpunks website and GitHub. The project has an established format, an open contribution process, a signature system for community endorsement, and an existing audience of families and educators who use and share the sheets. This grant represents an opportunity to expand that foundation into new territory rather than building something from scratch. The infrastructure, the values, and the community are already there.

Relevant: Are all the steps in your plan bringing you closer to your goal? Do you have activities in your plan that aren’t really relevant to what you want to happen?

Steps (all done iteratively and openly in our community toward our goal):

• Draft list of possible Why Sheets.
• Order list by impact/popularity.
• Include IDD self-advocates into the topic-building and ranking, not just feedback.
• Divide list among contributors.
• Update Why Sheet style guide for everyone to use.
• Iterate on Why Sheets in the open, committing changes to GitHub.
• Continuously solicit and integrate feedback.
• Progress through list.
• Accuracy/sourcing reviews.
• When a Why Sheet is sufficiently developed, publish to our main website. (Criteria: community review plus our existing signature/endorsement process, with an IDD-community sign-off.)
• Produce plain-language / Easy Read versions.
• Generate PDF and docx versions of Why Sheets and make available for download.
• Distribute to schools, students, and families with help of education allies like Human Restoration Project.
• Record measurables: sheets published, endorsements gathered, downloads, GitHub forks, distribution reach.
• Document the process so the expansion continues past the grant period.
• Report quarterly progress.

Time Bound: When do you want your project to be completed? What are the different check in points along the way?

Our project scales to the time and resources available. We will iterate continuously, producing Why Sheets as we go.

• Q1 — Foundation. Baseline recorded, metrics defined; topic list built and ranked with ID self-advocates; style guide updated; list divided among contributors. Quarterly meeting + budget update.
• Q2 — First batch in the open. Drafting on GitHub; first sheets through the readiness gate and endorsed. Meeting + budget update.
• Q3 — Formats and reach. Continue through the list; plain-language/Easy Read and PDF/docx versions produced; distribution begins with education allies. Meeting + budget update.
• Q4 — Close-out. Remaining sheets published and distributed; feedback gathered; final budget reconciliation and report; process documented for continuation.

Inclusive: How are marginalized people a part of the planning and decision making process in your project?

People with multiple learning disabilities are in our leadership and community. An Autistic former classroom teacher with 20 years of experience teaching kids with “Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities” (PMLD) is also among our leadership.

Further, Stimpunks defaults to open and works in public, which naturally invites relationship across community lines. People find the work, contribute to it, and connect with us through shared values rather than formal outreach campaigns. Our CC0 licensing means communities we aren’t part of can take what we build and make it their own without needing a relationship with us at all, which is itself a form of respect for their autonomy. Where we do build active relationships, we do so through genuine alignment around shared goals rather than extractive partnership. We are also honest about the limits of our perspective. Why Sheets covering Intellectual Disabilities, for example, are being developed with awareness that ID communities have their own self-advocacy traditions, organizations, and voices, and that doing this work well means listening to and centering those voices, not speaking for communities we don’t represent.

Equitable: How does your project work to remove barriers for everyone?

Our work is forged by our decades of effort to bring down barriers in the systems we inhabit. We mapped the common obstacles to DEI-AB and neurodiversity-affirming practice we experienced over and over and created Why Sheets to help students and families confront those obstacles. The feedback has been good. People use our Why Sheets in IEP meetings, court cases, and more.

Common obstacles:

14 Obstacles to DEI-AB and Neurodiversity Affirming Practice