What’s our motivation? Why do we do what we do? Here are the reasons behind Stimpunks — the help we provide, the need we answer, and the obligation we carry.

The Help: Real Help Against the Onslaught

We provide inclusive, community-based educational and creative opportunities for neurodivergent and disabled people. We challenge conventional systems and affirm lived experience. We believe our work offers a distinct and impactful contribution.

“Staying alive is a lot of work for a disabled person in an ableist society.” (Wong, 2020) We provide real help against the onslaught. We believe that direct support to individuals is the most effective approach to alleviating the barriers and challenges that prevent neurodivergent and disabled people from thriving in neuronormative and ableist environments. Our application process is simple, and our direct payments have the potential to transform how neurodivergent and disabled people access philanthropic capital.

Founded in 2021, Stimpunks Foundation was created by and for neurodivergent and disabled people, prioritizing autonomy, co-creation, and community empowerment. Our programming is shaped directly by those we serve, ensuring a lived-experience-centered model of support and growth. We serve neurodivergent and disabled people all over the United States and the world, offering accessible pathways for expression, education, and connection.

Our core programs include:

• Mutual Aid Initiatives: Providing direct financial support to individuals facing barriers due to ableism, ensuring they have the resources needed to thrive.
• Creator Grants: Offering financial support to neurodivergent and disabled creators across various fields, enabling them to immerse fully in their work and contribute to community enrichment.
• Learning Spaces: Establishing anti-ableist, human-centered educational environments that embrace neurodiversity and foster inclusive learning experiences.
• Open Research: Engaging in participatory, emancipatory research that amplifies the voices of neurodivergent and disabled people, challenging traditional academic narratives.
• Peer Support Networks: Coordinating support systems that connect people, fostering community and shared experiences.
• Cultural Documentation: Capturing and preserving the rich culture of neurodivergent and disabled communities, ensuring their stories and contributions are recognized.
• Educational Outreach: Developing and delivering programs based on lived experiences, providing authentic learning opportunities that resonate with our community.

We are proud of our approach that blends mutual aid, direct support, and adaptive learning  environments. Unlike many service providers that operate within rigid institutional frameworks,  we meet individuals where they are, honoring their pace, needs, and identities. Our organization operates through a horizontal, omnidirectional leadership structure, and all of our Directors and Board members are themselves neurodivergent and disabled—deepening our authenticity, accountability, and solidarity.

The Need: We Are Not Okay

Systemic barriers in healthcare, education, and employment disproportionately harm neurodivergent and disabled people, many of whom live without adequate support or representation. Existing systems often pathologize difference rather than embracing it. Despite significant need, most funding structures overlook the transformative, grassroots work being led by neurodivergent and disabled communities.

Neurodivergent and disabled people are routinely excluded from education, employment, healthcare, and social support. The systems that claim to serve us are often built without us—and therefore fail us.

Many of us:

• Face chronic unemployment or underemployment.
• Are pushed out of schools through punitive discipline.
• Live without access to adequate housing, healthcare, or support services.
• Experience medical, educational, and institutional harm.

There is an urgent need for culturally competent, community-rooted support that affirms difference, celebrates stimming, and recognizes disability as culture—not deficit.

One in four U.S. adults have a disability. However, our community receives only 2% of US grant funding, and only 19% of us are employed. We can’t just let that be the truth. We have to challenge the norm and change the narrative around people who are neurodivergent or disabled.

Our Moment of Obligation: Responsibility for the survival of entire communities lies with us.

A moment of obligation is the instant when you can no longer look away — when your own experience of a broken system makes it impossible to leave the next person to face it alone. For Stimpunks, that moment came through lived necessity: rolling our own education because public systems failed us, building our own care infrastructure because existing institutions weren’t built for us, and finding, as the Combahee River Collective put it, that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Obligation isn’t guilt. It isn’t charity. It’s the recognition that we know what’s needed, we know it from the inside, and that knowledge carries weight.

Stimpunks was created to forge the way for educational inclusion and to give our community the means to survive and to thrive. We as disabled and neurodivergent people had to roll our own education, because even the “all means all” of public education failed to include us. We had to create our own care systems, because “we realized that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us.” “Responsibility for the survival of entire communities lies with us.”