We exist as friction.
Changing the Disability Design Narrative – UX CakE
We exist as friction, and it’s exhausting. Allies, load-share our burden of existing as friction against structural ableism. “Staying alive is a lot of work for a disabled person in an ableist society.” Share some of that work and friction. We need respite from this wildly painful work. We need help against the onslaught.
I would like to honour all the autistic people who survive the care system somehow.
Ann Memmott PGC🌈 on Twitter
All those who survive extreme ‘therapy’.
All those who are brought to their knees, reading hellish descriptions of their loved people.
And all who did not survive this onslaught.
Help
Some ways you can help in your everyday life:
- Reframe yourself and others. This is hard and important work necessary to all other work. Change the narrative. Start reframing.
- Advocate for accessibility at school, work, and in your community.
- Be a threat to inequity in your spheres of influence.
- Combat the myths.
- Use and promote Identity First Language.
- Elevate care as infrastructure. Stimpunks exists because our systems effectively don’t.
- Celebrate our interdependence!
Want to volunteer with us? Volunteers are the lifeblood of nonprofit foundations.
If you are in the Austin, Texas, USA area, we need help with care work, transportation, running our learning space, and putting on accessible events for our community, including punk shows.
If you are anywhere in the world, distributed learning and collaboration is a big component of what we do. We’re always working on our website and our outreach and our operations. Help us use technology to run this thing. Help us tell our stories with an authentic, candid, and vulnerable outpouring of words, science, and art. Help us find our people and co-create ecologies of care. Help us fundraise so we can keep our community going.
Here are some things we need help with:
- Share our website and spread the word of our existence.
- Follow us on our social networks.
- Subscribe to our newsletter.
- Write alt text for images on our website.
- Gather research for our website.
- Write pages for our website.
- Design for vertical storytelling on our website.
- Create plain language and easy read versions of our web pages.
- Translate pages on our website.
- Create art for our website.
- Flow patrol our website and systems.
- Design print materials.
- Do research and data entry for the various databases we maintain such as aligned organizations and their service offerings.
- Fundraise.
- Find grants and write grant applications.
- Create workshops.
- Create courses.
- Create learning space programming.
- Mentor people in our community on your areas of expertise.
- Support events on-site (Austin, TX, USA).
- Support our learning space on-site (Austin, TX, USA).
An Ecology of Care
Our community seeks to connect a diverse array of folks into an ecology of care with access to a competency network of people with complementary skills.
Our Collaborative Ecology
Aș part of our organizing and collaboration, we practice and build:
For the first time, the age of digital networks enables us to construct cognitive assistants that help us to nurture and maintain globally distributed human scale competency networks – networks of mutual trust. It is time to tap into this potential and to combine it with the potential of zero-marginal cost global communication and collaboration.
All healthy and resilient institutions have a well-functioning competency network (Laloux 2014; Wilson 2015). A good way to understand competency networks is via the notion of trustworthiness and the nurturing and maintenance of trusted relationships (Bettin and Elliffe 2016). A competency network can be formalised as a directed graph of experience-based pair-wise trustworthiness ratings in relation to various domains between the members of a group. You can think of it as the gifts that people bring to life by relating to each other.
The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations
Collaborative niche construction allows organisations and people to participate in the evolution of a living system and results in resilient social ecosystems.
The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations
“The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale” from the Autistic Collaboration Trust is foundational to Stimpunks.
The Autistic Collaboration community grows organically, at human scale, at a human pace, one trusted relationship at a time, in the form of self-organising small groups that collaborate on specific initiatives, contributing to the wellbeing of Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent and intersectionally marginalised people.
Our evolving web of relationships, mutual aid, and peer support initiatives is best understood in terms of emergent Ecologies of Care beyond the human.
Ecologies of Care | Autistic Collaboration
The notion of disability in our society is underscored by a bizarre conception of “independence”.
The Myth of Independence: How The Social Model of Disability Exposes Society’s Double Standards » NeuroClastic
It is time to celebrate our interdependence!
Collaboration allows us to create genuinely safe spaces for autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people.
Values Fit
Before volunteering and joining our ecology of care, get to know us and our mission, creed, covenant, manifesto, and philosophy.
Do our values fit yours?
GitLab Values | GitLab
Our values are expressed all over our website, but in particular on our “organize our lives around love and care” pages.
Let’s organize our lives around love and care.
Mission
We exist for the direct support and mutual aid of neurodivergent and disabled people.
We serve our loved people so we can keep on living through the onslaught.
Creed
I center the marginalized and the different. I center edge cases, because edge cases are stress cases and design is tested at the edges. I center neurodivergent and disabled experience in service to all bodyminds.
Covenant
We pledge to act and interact in ways that contribute to an open, welcoming, diverse, inclusive, and healthy community.
Philosophy
We steer by these acquired phrases. They are compasses and stars that align us on our mission.
Interdependence
It is time to celebrate our interdependence. Interdependence acknowledges that our survival is bound up together, that we are interconnected and what you do impacts others. Interdependence is the only way out of most of the most pressing issues we face today.
Edges
Our designs, our societies, and the boundaries of our compassion are tested at the edges, where the truths told are of bias, inequality, injustice, and thoughtlessness.
Manifesto
This is a manifesto that begins but will never end. This is a translation of my world into yours. This is a protest of the notion that there is any correct way to live. We reject neuronormativity and demand the right to learn and live differently.
Love and Care
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
Contributor Covenant
All Stimpunks agree to abide by our contributor covenant while in Stimpunks space.
Do you agree with our covenant and code of conduct?
Contributor Covenant: Frequently Asked Questions about Contributor Covenant
Roles in Social Change
In our lives and as part of organizations, workplaces and movements, many of us play different roles in pursuit of equity, shared liberation, inclusion, and justice. And yet, we often get overwhelmed, lost, and burned out. Some of us are newcomers to ongoing social change efforts and don’t know where to start. Still others are catalyzed into action in the midst of a crisis in our community.
The Social Change Ecosystem Map (2020)
The Social Change Ecosystem Map is a framework that can help individuals, networks, and organizations align with social change values, individual roles, and the broader ecosystem.
While considering volunteering, consider your roles in social change.
The Social Change Ecosystem Map (2020)
- Weavers: I see the through-lines of connectivity between people, places, organizations, ideas, and movements.
- Experimenters: I innovate, pioneer, and invent. I take risks and course-correct as needed.
- Frontline Responders: I address community crises by marshaling and organizing resources, networks, and messages.
- Visionaries: I imagine and generate our boldest possibilities, hopes and dreams, and remind us of our direction.
- Builders: I develop, organize, and implement ideas, practices, people, and resources in service of a collective vision.
- Caregivers: I nurture and nourish the people around me by creating and sustaining a community of care, joy, and connection.
- Disruptors: I take uncomfortable and risky actions to shake up the status quo, to raise awareness, and to build power.
- Healers: I recognize and tend to the generational and current traumas caused by oppressive systems, institutions, policies, and practices.
- Storytellers: I craft and share our community stories, cultures, experiences, histories, and possibilities through art, music, media, and movement.
- Guides: I teach, counsel, and advise, using my gifts of well-earned discernment and wisdom.
Playbooks at Stimpunks
There are lots of ways to help out. We offer these four playbooks that we borrowed from Human Restoration Project as convenient shorthand.
Joymakers
Joymakers assist in design, artwork, music creation, and other creative endeavors.
Empaths
Empaths assist in partnerships, event hosting, and social media campaigns.
Envoys
Envoys assist in reaching out to schools, fundraising, and informing our work.
Operators
Operator assist in transcription/translation, copy-editing, data entry, and more.
- Which roles in social change do you relate/aspire to?
- Which playbooks at Stimpunks fit you best?
- From our list of things we need help with, which ones interest you?
Volunteer Form
If all that feels like a values fit, here’s our volunteer form.
Our volunteer form has four parts:
- First, we ask for contact information (most of which is optional).
- 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 interests and how you can help our mission.
- Finally, we show you a preview of your submission so you can review and revise before you submit.
🔐 About Us and What We Do With Your Information
Chelsea, 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, accountants, 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.
Norah enjoying Western Wonderland: the annual, local pop-up ice skating rink.
Nap Director and Self-care Expert
Dylan
