NOTICE:
2026 Mutual Aid and Creator Grant Update:

Both Grants pipelines will be opening on Thursday 01/01/2026 ~ between 8AM – Noon CST. We will be accepting and processing the first round of 50 new applications for 2026.

Please submit only 1 of each grant application per year (not per round). If interested and relevant you may apply for one Mutual Aid Grant and one Creator Grant each year. We will re-open the grant pipelines again in June for a second round of 50 more applications, to be added in with the previous 50 applications from January. The pipelines will officially be closed for the year once we have reached 100 active applications in each grant pipeline in June.

Click here to view the Request Aid (Mutual Aid Grant) Questions in PDF format!

Based on much-appreciated feedback from community members, we have decided to share this info. to make the application process less stressful and more accessible. This gives applicants more time to process and plan their responses for when the application form goes live on the date mentioned above.

Staying alive is a lot of work for a disabled person in an ableist society…
DISABILITY VISIBILITY: FIRST PERSON STORIES FROM THE 21ST CENTURY

Each month, we plan to issue 1 or 2 mutual aid grants of up to US$500 each to fellow neurodivergent and disabled people. These grants cover anything you need for your welfare and survival.

Please use the form below to initiate your aid request. All of your information is private and is used solely for evaluating the request and our internal compliance processes. It will not be marketed or sold.

Unfortunately, we cannot provide requests to minors without guardian approval. We also cannot provide aid for tuition costs of any kind. We cannot provide any urgent mutual aid funds. We award our Mutual Aid grants monthly to active applicants.

How Do Grants Work?
What Do Grants Cover?
Do I Need a Diagnosis?
Anxious?
Burned Out?
Privacy Notice
Legal and Tax Stuff
Ethical Principles and Code of Conduct
The Form
What Information Do We Collect?

How Do Grants Work?

The way our mutual aid works is we process grants once a month, about one week before the end of the month. We have a board meeting and select the grantees for that month. Then, we will send out an email letting you know if you have been selected or not.

You can receive up to (but not guaranteed) 3 mutual aid grants in total. Each grant is usually US$500. This may be subject to decrease as we work to stretch all available funding of these grants. Your lifetime mutual aid cap is $1,500.

If you are not selected for a certain month, your application will automatically roll over to the next month until the end of the year (12/31/2026). Please note: We get many requests from people in great need, so you might keep rolling over and never be selected. We’re sorry if this happens to you. It’s not because your need isn’t sufficient or not recognized. A lot of it comes down to random chance as we distribute too few grants in a time of great need. We try to keep this process simple so you don’t have to spend too much time to have a chance at a lottery.

If you are selected, we will need to verify your identity before sending the funds. This can be done in a quick video where you just hold a photo I.D. up and we verify it is you. While we’re on video, we’ll gladly chat with you and hold space for you if you want to share your story and how you’re doing. Totally up to you. If video verification is not an option, you can text or email a selfie holding up your I.D. (this information will only be used for the purpose of verifying your identity). If you have a deadname, we can work with that.

We consider requests on a monthly basis. We will always get back to you on the status of your request. We would like to approve all requests and offer larger, more impactful grants. As our donor and funding outreach grows, we hope to reach that goal.

NOTICE: Starting on January 1, 2026, you will need to resubmit any previous applications from 2025. We restart the pipeline at the beginning of the year each year. We do this to avoid operational burnout from carrying many requests forward.

What Do Grants Cover?

Our mutual aid grants are very flexible. They cover anything you need to live, work, play, and survive. They can assist your welfare and survival however you need.

Here are some examples of things we commonly cover:

Rent and housing
Credit card bills
Clothing and personal hygiene items
Medication
Medical supplies
Medical bills
Education costs or debt
Food

This is a non-exhaustive list. We have yet to encounter a situation our grants couldn’t cover.

BTW, we also offer “creator grants” to help fund your art, advocacy, or research. These are usually US$3,000 grants offered to neurodivergent and disabled creators. You can apply for both a creator grant and a mutual aid grant.

Do I Need a Diagnosis?

You do not need to be formally diagnosed as neurodivergent or disabled to qualify for our grants. We respect and encourage self-identification. When filling out the grant request form, you do not need to provide proof of diagnosis.

Self diagnosis is not just “valid” — it is liberatory. When we define our community ourselves and wrest our right to self-definition back from the systems that painted us as abnormal and sick, we are powerful, and free.

You can pursue formal diagnosis if you want, for legal protection and educational access. It will never be what makes you Autistic. If you’re uncertain whether you are, meet more of us and join in community with us. We need each other far more than we need psychiatric approval.
Dr. Devon Price

For more on our philosophy regarding diagnosis and self-identification, visit our Diagnosis glossary page.

Self-identification offers advantages in that it could constitute a key step towards autistic (and also more generally neurodivergent) liberation, by transferring power into the hands of autistic people themselves
What’s in a name? The costs and benefits of a formal autism diagnosis – Sue Fletcher-Watson, 2023

Anxious?

Anxious? We’re neurodivergent and disabled and have huge form anxiety from filling out forms to prove, over and over, our disability and neurodivergence. Don’t worry about getting it wrong. Tell your story how you can.

Asking for help is a wonderful way to build community & engage in meaningful collaboration. In asking for help you also uplift others who want to show up for you.
Just a reminder that asking for help is a contribution

Burned Out?

Burned out? Burnout is a common theme in requests we receive. Some of us at Stimpunks have experienced career-ending burnout. We’d like to buy you some time to recover.

Here’s a passage from our burnout page from Ryan, talking about his episodes of burnout.

I’ve experienced several moments of burnout in my life and career. Being something that I neurologically am not is exhausting. Wearing the mask of neurotypicality drains my batteries and melts my spoons. For a long time, for decades, I didn’t fully understand what was going on with me. I didn’t understand the root causes of my cycles of burnout. Finding the Actually Autistic community online woke me to the concept of autistic burnout. When I found the community writing excerpted below, I finally understood an important part of myself. Looking back on my life, I recognized those periods when coping mechanisms had stopped working and crumbled. I recognized my phases and changes as continuous fluid adaptation.

These periods of burnout caused problems at school and work. I would lose executive function and self-care skills. My capacity for sensory and social overload dwindled to near nothing. I avoided speaking and retreated from socializing. I was spent. I couldn’t maintain the facade anymore. I had to stop and pay the price.
🔥 Autistic Burnout: The Cost of Masking and Passing – Stimpunks Foundation

Privacy Notice

We realize this is sensitive information you are sharing with us.

We will keep it private.
We won’t share this information with anyone.
The only people with access to this information are the Directors of Stimpunks.
We will delete this information upon request.
Here is our privacy policy.
Here is our cookie policy.
Be warned that our system collects IP addresses in our server logs.
An IP address can be used to approximate your location on earth, including city and sometimes street.
There is no way to turn off server logging.
We do not otherwise collect IP addresses.
If you are concerned with us having your IP address, use a VPN.

Please read the data collection and privacy disclosure below the form before submitting your information. We disclose where your information is stored and what we do to keep it safe.

Legal and Tax Stuff

In most cases, grants are not taxed as part of your income. We do not have to issue form 1099 for grants if you provide some basic documentation on how you spent the grant. If you do not document how you spent the grant, we will have to issue form 1099. Once you get a grant from us, we will follow up with you over time to see how you are doing and gather needed documentation on how the grant was spent.

On Grants and Taxes

We do not usually need to issue form 1099 for grants. In most cases, grants are not taxed as part of your income. If in doubt, consult an accountant to be sure.

Here are some relevant articles:

In general, amounts granted to an individual solely out of the payor’s “detached and disinterested generosity” are treated as “gifts” that are excluded from tax under section 102 of the Internal Revenue Code. The IRS has confirmed that a payment made by a charity to an individual that responds to the individual’s needs (in order words, is motivated by charitable intent rather than any moral or legal duty) qualifies for this exclusion, and consequently is not subject to Form 1099 reporting. See Revenue Ruling 2003-12.
Must a Form 1099 be issued for a need-based grant made to an individual? – Q&A #81 — Sustainability Education 4 Nonprofits

When it comes to nonprofit taxes, because these funds are considered charitable grants and not designated as payment for services and/or compensation, organizations don’t need to issue 1099s for disbursed grant funds.
Can Nonprofit Grants Be Taxed? | Instrumentl

Grants to individuals for travel, study, or other similar purposes (including loans made for charitable purposes, and program-related investments) are taxable expenditures, unless the following conditions are met:

The grant is awarded on an objective and nondiscriminatory basis under a procedure approved in advance by the Service, and

It is shown to the satisfaction of the Service that one of the following requirements is met–a. The grant is a scholarship or fellowship and is to be used for study at an educational institution that normally maintains a regular faculty and curriculum and normally has a regularly organized body of students in attendance at the place where the educational activities are carried on. For these purposes, grant recipients need not be limited to degree candidates, nor must the grant be limited to tuition, fees, and course-required books, supplies and equipment. A recipient may use grant funds for room, board, travel, research, clerical help or equipment, that are incidental to the purposes of the scholarship or fellowship grant.b. The grant qualifies as a prize or award that is excludible from gross income under Internal Revenue Code section 74(b), if the recipient is selected from the general public. For this purpose, the recipient may keep the prize or award, and need not authorize the foundation to transfer the prize or award to a governmental unit or to another charity.c. The grant’s purpose is to achieve a specific objective, produce a report or similar product, or improve or enhance a literary, artistic, musical, scientific, teaching, or similar capacity, skill or talent of the grantee.

Grants to Individuals | Internal Revenue Service

As a 501(c)(3), we can’t fund political campaign related activities.

Under the Internal Revenue Code, all section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office. Contributions to political campaign funds or public statements of position (verbal or written) made on behalf of the organization in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for public office clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity. Violating this prohibition may result in denial or revocation of tax-exempt status and the imposition of certain excise taxes.

Certain activities or expenditures may not be prohibited depending on the facts and circumstances. For example, certain voter education activities (including presenting public forums and publishing voter education guides) conducted in a non-partisan manner do not constitute prohibited political campaign activity. In addition, other activities intended to encourage people to participate in the electoral process, such as voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives, would not be prohibited political campaign activity if conducted in a non-partisan manner.

On the other hand, voter education or registration activities with evidence of bias that (a) would favor one candidate over another; (b) oppose a candidate in some manner; or (c) have the effect of favoring a candidate or group of candidates, will constitute prohibited participation or intervention.

Unfortunately, we cannot provide grants to minors without guardian approval. We are also limited to US residents only.

We cannot provide aid for tuition costs of any kind.

We cannot provide any urgent funds. We award our Mutual Aid grants monthly to active applicants. We award our Creator grants quarterly to active applicants.

Ethical Principles and Code of Conduct

At Stimpunks, we have sensitive conversations about trauma and mental health with our clients. We hold ourselves to the ethical principles and code of conduct of psychologists.

https://www.apa.org/ethics/code

Talking about clients to other clients, for example, is not okay.

When someone tells you the intimate details of their life, and you go and tell a bunch of strangers about it, you have done something wrong. It is perhaps only because this practice is so entrenched that we tend to forget this.
Mental Health and the Invasion of Privacy | Psychology Today

The Form

Our form to request aid has four parts:

First, we ask for contact information.
Then we ask for your social media. This is optional but helpful in us getting to know each other.
Then we ask you to describe your need and tell your story however you can.
Finally, we show you a preview of your submission so you can review and revise before you submit.

NOTICE:
2026 Mutual Aid and Creator Grant Update:

Both Grants pipelines will be opening on Thursday 01/01/2026 ~ between 8AM – Noon CST. We will be accepting and processing the first round of 50 new applications for 2026.

Did our spam blocker or CAPTCHAs get in your way when you submitted the form?

We’d prefer to run without any spam prevention like CAPTCHAs, but we can’t handle the flood of spam that results.

We don’t like interactive, challenge based CAPTCHAs that involve solving puzzles or identifying images or distorted letters. They are not accessible.

We use score based CAPTCHAs that fall back to the problematic challenge based CAPTCHAs for most of our forms. Cascading them like that avoids showing challenge CAPTCHAs to most people, but there are still folks experiencing them, alas.

If you are presented with an inaccessible CAPTCHA or blocked by our spam prevention, we’re very sorry. Please email us and we’ll help.

What Information Do We Collect?

🔐 About Us and What We Do With Your Information

Chelsea, Inna, Norah, and Ryan are at the other end of our contact form. Get to know us on our About page. Alas, we can’t usually move at the speed of emergencies, and sometimes we take a week or two off for self-care. We get lots of spam and sometimes miss your requests in the noise. If you don’t hear from us within a week, feel free to contact us again.

About your information:

We keep your data private and share your data only with third parties that make our services possible. Read our full Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy.
If you submitted a form to us, your information will be entered into our forms software (WPForms and WordPress).
A subset of that information will go to our CRM software (HubSpot).
A subset of that will go to our accounting software (QuickBooks Online) if you receive money from us.
This data retention is solely for legal compliance purposes. We will not sell or give your data to third parties. We will not use your information to market anything to you.
Your IP address will be captured in our server logs.
If you are concerned with us having your IP address, use a VPN.
We collect as little as we can from you and do our best to keep it secure.
We use 1Password for Business to secure our accounts with long, randomly generated, unique passwords.
Your information will be reviewed by our tiny team of directors and Board members, including: Chelsea, Norah, and Ryan.
Periodically, nonprofit lawyers and consultants will have access to some information in order to audit our processes for ethics and legality.
We periodically delete form submissions and any documents attached when we no longer need to keep them. We consider personal information a toxic asset and don’t want to keep more of your data than we have to.
We will also delete your information from our systems upon request.
However, if you get a grant from us we do have to retain contact information about who we given to, as well as the amount given. We retain this contact information for 3 years as required by the Internal Revenue Service.