Stimpunks was forged in the quest for survival and inclusion. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit built by and for neurodivergent and disabled people. We are a community affair. We’re Autistic, ADHD, OCD, PTSD, Tourettes, schizophrenic, bipolar, apraxic, dyslexic, dyspraxic, dyscalculic, non-speaking, and more. 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. 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. Disabled and neurodivergent people are always edge cases, and edge cases are stress cases. We can help you design for the edges, because we live at the edges. We are the canaries. We are “the fish that must fight the current to swim upstream.“

Have you ever taken flack from the bullies on attack
Cause you're different

They laugh and call you names
But that ain't no badge of shame
Just cause you're different

People gonna stare, you unsettle them and scare ’em
Cause we're different

Walking down the street
When you pass they
Take a peek
There's something different

Live your life outside the box
Blow off all the empty talk
They focus on the things you're not
Just walk your walk

And roll your roll

I wanna see a feisty group of disabled people around the world…if you don’t respect yourself and if you don’t demand what you believe in for yourself, you’re not gonna get it.

Judith Heumann

Administrivia

Before we get feisty, here are a couple administrative about pages.

• Brand Identity: Logos, Symbols, and Visual Storytelling
• License: Everything Is a Remix

Okay, feisty time.

Ryan Boren (he/they), Co-Founder, Creative Director, Board Secretary

Ryan is a former WordPress lead developer who retired from tech in 2021 after 15 years at Automattic, the distributed company he helped start. He finished his time at Automattic working on the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion team and helping create and run the Neurodiversity Employee Resource Group. Building a community, a company, a platform, and an ERG was an intense ride full of mistakes and learning that Ryan distills into Stimpunks.

Ryan is a Chronic Neurodivergent Depressed Queer Punk who found community amidst online genderpunks, neuropunks, and cripplepunks conversant in the social model of disability. That community and connection gave rise to the name of our endeavor, Stimpunks. “Everything that was normally supposed to be hidden was brought to the front.”

Inna Boren (she/her), Co-Founder, Financial Director, Board President

Inna went from big tech project manager to family case worker. Her skills managing software and hardware teams are now used to manage teams of doctors, care workers, and educators. She’s our motive force as we “fight the current to swim upstream.”

Chelsea Adams (she/her), Executive Director

Chelsea served as a combat medic in the United States Army for 6 years. After leaving the army in 2014 she went back to school with the goal of getting her nursing degree. During this time she worked on the oncology floor of St. Davids South Austin. She decided to go in a different direction career wise and currently is pursuing non profit work. Her goal is to continue her passion of helping people.

Becky Hicks (she/her), Board Member

Becky Hicks is an Art Director at HM Advertising. She has almost 30 years experience in advertising, designing for print, web and styling and directing photo shoots. In her free time she runs the Algiers Point Free lil Pantry and entertains her pet pig, Coco Chanel.

Coco’s Setlist

Volunteers

Kristina Brooke Daniele (she/her)

Kristina Brooke Daniele is a Black, queer, neurodivergent homeschooling mom, educator, wife, and author of two books, (Civil Rights Then and Now and i wandered, lost: poems). Kristina has worked as an educator in some capacity for over 15 years- first as a classroom teacher, then as a homeschooling teacher, and currently, as an education consultant. She is passionate about collaborative projects centering on creating and maintaining safe-spaces for those who have for too long been pushed aside. During her time at Automattic, Kristina spearheaded the creation of the Employee Resource Group, Cocoamattic for Black employees at the company.

Adriel Jeremiah Wool (he/him)

Adriel Jeremiah is an computer programmer with a deep background in origami and folding.

This artwork is an extension of a world view involving folding; often involving higher dimensional spaces.

Many of these designs contain the mathematical magic of the transcendental numbers of nature, and all of them are the extension of the provisions of space itself; to be both physically folded, and conceptually folded, circularily (sic) and across many levels of expression.

Brandi Cerna (she/her)

Brandi Cerna served as a public-school educator for 9 years and is currently enrolled in a full-time nursing program. She will graduate in April 2023 with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. Brandi desires to provide quality care and help people feel valued.

Heike Blakley (she/her)

Heike Blakley is a self-taught, emerging artist working with a wide array of mediums such as acrylic, oil, watercolor, pencil, charcoal, pastel, mixed media, pen & ink.

Also specializing in resin art, jewelry making, woodwork, clay sculptures, fabric art and poetry.

Using her creativity as a form of learning and for meditative purposes, she is determined to, “absorb as much “collective knowledge,” as she is able to grasp in one lifetime and effectively communicate understanding through art.”

Heike gains inspiration through spirituality, the conscious/ subconscious mind, studying esoteric natures of the universe, her interactions with others, the environment as well as understanding herself.

Combining surrealism, figure, abstract, textured, fine and visual art, she describes her process as “eclectic art”.

Kyle Duce (he/him)

Raised between the San Juan Mountains of Colorado and a small farming community in Wisconsin, Kyle gained an appreciation of the land, wildlife and the beauty of nature.  Kyle grew up as a 3rd generation artist, his grandfather was an oil painter and his mother ran a stained glass business out of their home in Wisconsin.  There was no shortage of art projects, outdoor activities, hunting, fishing, camping and gardening.  Post college, Kyle traveled and moved back to Colorado, Seattle and now Austin.  He has been living in downtown cities since college.  The clash of these two timelines reflects the duality expression in most of his work. This duality can also be seen through his passion for the skate, snow, music, tattoo and architecture world.

Kyle Duce’s work ties in these elements to showcase his broad range of skill sets from landscape, sculpture, music inspired live painting, taxidermy, and lowbrow styles.  Kyle’s main goal is to evoke emotion when looking deeper into his paintings.  Finding that balance between the serenity of the outdoors and the fast-paced gritty city living.

Betsy Selvam (she/her)

Betsy Selvam is an artist from Vellore, south India. Currently pursuing her PhD, Betsy has had a lifelong passion for literature and art. As a neurodivergent artist, Betsy hopes to use art and writing for positive change. She has been published in The Blue Marble Review, Oyster River Pages and Door is a Jar, among other places, for her work.

What makes us different, makes all the difference in the world.

Our friends at Randimals have a saying,

We agree.

Many years ago, a friend dubbed Ryan “Bearmouse”, intuiting a part of his neurodivergent spiky profile.

There is consensus regarding some neurodevelopmental conditions being classed as neurominorities, with a ‘spiky profile’ of executive functions difficulties juxtaposed against neurocognitive strengths as a defining characteristic.

Neurominorities, Spiky Profiles, and the Biopsychosocial Model at Work

Inna decided on Bunnybadger and Chelsea decided on Pandillo. Their Randimals also hint at their neurodivergent profiles.

Image credit: Becky Hicks

Our Randimals capture our exposure anxiety, social anxiety, rejection sensitive dysphoria, emotional sunburn, very grand emotions, justice sensitivity, and other neurodivergent traits.

Read about Randimals, spiky profiles, learning terroir, neurological pluralism and Weird Pride on our “Different” page.

Our divergent bodyminds aren’t all that’s different about us. We’re different than most autism and disability organizations because we are led by autistic and disabled people. We use different language, different framing, and have little patience for respectability.

Respectability politics didn’t save me then, and they won’t save our community or movement now or in the future either.

Our movement, however, needs nothing of respectability politics. Accepting — conceding, surrendering, submitting to — that will only erode our movement until it crumbles entirely. Respectability politics is what’s gotten us into reliance on foundations and nonprofits, and elected officials and bureaucrats, and policies and programs that only benefit the most privileged and resourced members of our communities at the direct expense of the most marginalized. Radical, militant anger — and radical, militant hope, and radical, wild dreams, and radical, active love — that’s what’ll get us past the death machines of ableism and capitalism and white supremacy and laws and institutions working overtime to kill us.

Autistic Hoya — A blog by Lydia X. Z. Brown: The neurodiversity movements needs its shoes off, and fists up.

We’re a Feisty Group of Disabled People

That girl thinks she's the queen of the neighborhood
She's got the hottest trike in town
That girl, she holds her head up so high
I think I wanna be her best friend, yeah

Rebel girl, rebel girl

I wanna see a feisty group of disabled people around the world…if you don’t respect yourself and if you don’t demand what you believe in for yourself, you’re not gonna get it.

Judith Heumann

We’re a NeurodiVenture

We are a NeurodiVenture and a Teal organization running on the advice process, psychological safety, self-determination theory, the prosocial framework, mutual trust, collaborative niche construction, and open source. We do it in a trauma and neurodiversity informed way using polyvagal theory and the neuroscience of community.

NeurodiVenture : an inclusive non-hierarchical organisation operated by neurodivergent people that provides a safe and nurturing environment for divergent thinking, creativity, exploration, and collaborative niche construction.

NeurodiVerse : human scale cultures created by neurodiversity within the human species

NeurodiVentures | Autistic Collaboration

The Polyvagal Theory discovered by Dr. Stephen Porges is a working model of the autonomic nervous system which connects safety and social connection with health, well being, and recovery.

The Vagus Nerve & Chronic Illness — Trauma Geek

We Do The Truly Essential Work

We aspire to do the “truly essential work”.

We are both shamed and guilted for asking for “handouts”, and yet we’re also expected to beg.

And that is why the vast majority of philanthropical resources continue to go to the same well-resourced, established organizations that are largely not accountable to directly impacted communities and to the people who have the most to lose, whereas organizations that are doing work on the front lines directly from community are infinitely less likely to be able to access even a fraction of the same funding pools and even in the space, especially in the space of disability philanthropy.

Lydia X.Z. Brown Powerfully Addresses Philanthropy’s Ableist Practices

The David Prize claims that the submission process “should take no more than 30 minutes. Yes, 30 minutes.” At first glance, the application seems straightforward: ten questions, with a maximum of 280-1,500 characters per answer. But it is a process that will disproportionately impact many chronically unwell and racialized individuals, as well as non cis men, who will recontextualize their ideas to appeal to a billionaire philanthropist. Alex and I spent roughly 80 hours over the course of two weeks to complete the written application. This sort of request for proposals, Alex pointed out, creates temporal lotteries, in which the buy-in isn’t money, but time.

Philanthropic Gentrification. How The David Prize turns activists… | by Liz Jackson | Medium

We Find Our People

Got called an alien for bein' myself
I ain't got the patience to be someone else

--hope for the underrated youth by yungblud

How can we cultivate spaces where everyone has that soaring sense of inclusion, where we can have difficult and meaningful conversations?

Because everyone deserves the shelter and embrace of crip space, to find their people and set down roots in a place they can call home.

“The Beauty of Spaces Created for and by Disabled People” by s.e. smith in “Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the 21st Century“

Access intimacy is also the intimacy I feel with many other disabled and sick people who have an automatic understanding of access needs out of our shared similar lived experience of the many different ways ableism manifests in our lives. Together, we share a kind of access intimacy that is ground-level, with no need for explanations. Instantly, we can hold the weight, emotion, logistics, isolation, trauma, fear, anxiety and pain of access. I don’t have to justify and we are able to start from a place of steel vulnerability.

Access Intimacy: The Missing Link | Leaving Evidence

We Rebuild What You Destroy

We can take turns taking the reins
Lean on each other when we need some extra strength
We’ll never cave or we’ll never waver
And we’ll always become braver and braver

We’ll dance like nobody’s there
Wе’ll dance without any cares
We’ll talk 'bout problеms we share
We’ll talk 'bout things that ain’t fair
We’ll sing 'bout things we don’t know
We’ll sing to people and show
What it means to be young and growing up

--Growing Up by The Linda Lindas

Keep on Livin’ Punk

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