What I have always been hoping to accomplish is the creation of community.
Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century
Community is magic. Community is power. Community is resistance.
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.
Disability’s no longer just a diagnosis; it’s a community.
Join us! We are catalysing intersectional solidarity via participant driven events that provide a safe space for neurodivergent, disabled, queer, and otherwise marginalized people to engage in omni-directional learning and mutual aid.
To join our community and help each other survive, fill out our brief join form.
Solidarity is the only way home.
On Organizing
We must build collective power.
We must deepen our relationships of trust and care across lines of difference, across coalitions, across communities. That’s the foundation upon which everything else resides.
Communication and Collaboration
The Stimpunks Discord server is our tool for coordinating all Stimpunks projects and related activities. Please request access on the Join page. You are invited to join, contribute to our projects and initiatives, and explore new project ideas with the Stimpunks community. Note that our Contributor Covenant/Code of Conduct applies while in Stimpunks space.
- Only members can see who is in the group.
- You can remain as private as you prefer or need to be.
- To avoid information overload, we have set up a dedicated channel for each project team, so that each team can focus their project, and we will set up further channels as needed to support new project ideas that are gaining momentum and committed supporters.
The 4 Ms of Membership
We foster a culture of membership with the 4 Ms.
- Membership Cards
- Maps
- Meeting Halls
- Mutual Aid
The US Is a Civic Desert. To Survive, the Democratic Party Needs to Transform Itself. | The Nation
Membership Cards
When you join our community, we will send you a digital membership card and badge that you can include on your website or print out.
Maps
Meeting Halls
We meet online in our Discord server. Please request access on the Join page.
We also do local meetups in some cities.
Mutual Aid
We help each other out in our mutual aid Discord channel. Library economies, competency networks, sharing spoons, and support swapping are all encouraged.
Mutual aid is a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions by building relationships, networks of reciprocity, and communal autonomy from the state.
Build an Ecology of Care
No one is coming to save us. We have to save ourselves.
Rebuilding The Village – Google Docs
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.
We still have access to all our innate collaborative capabilities. If we care to listen to our guts, hearts, and minds, we can (re)learn everything we need for co-creating ecologies of care beyond the human.
The ripples of collaborative niche construction and intersectional solidarity are spreading. More and more small cosmo-local bands of marginalised people are coming together to catalyse intersectional solidarity.
Healing – Resisting internalised ableism | Autistic Collaboration
We “engage in collaborative niche construction at human scale.”
The human capacity for language would not have given us any adaptive ecological advantage if it did not primarily serve the purpose of improving our ability to understand, trust, and rely on each other, and thereby to enable us to engage in collaborative niche construction at human scale – such that every human in a cultural organism to some extent contributes unique capabilities and lived experiences to the cultural organism.
We must build a counterculture of care. Care work makes all other work possible.
We need a counterculture of care. Because the dominant culture just keeps getting colder and deadlier.
Putting care—not just care work, but care—at the center of our economy, our politics, is to orient ourselves around our interdependence. We do this not because someone’s work is what makes them worthy. We do it so we all live and live with dignity.
We have work to do. We will support each other. We will build our own ecologies of care and our own competency networks. We will build communities and network rhizomatically.
On discord, there is a growing network of communities. I have lovingly dubbed this collective The Autistic Rhizome. They are an interconnected network of knowledge exchange, and mutual aid and support that have displaced the hierarchical nature of advocate/follower relationships.
We are equal in these spaces.
This doesn’t mean that all knowledge shared is useful in advancing the neurodiversity movement. Like any knowledge, some is good, some is bad, most is somewhere in the middle.
This growing network consists of communities that do not depend on each other to exist, but are still enriched by their interconnection. There is no starting or end point. There is no advancing through communities based on levels of knowledge. They just simply exist, and people come and go as they please.
Neuro-anarchy and the rise of the Autistic Rhizome – DGH Neurodivergent Consultancy
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.
Our Community Members
Here are lists of the individuals and organizations that are part of our community:
To be included in these lists, join our community with this button.
Support Our Community
You can help us build ecologies of care by making a one time donation, becoming a sustaining member, purchasing from our merch store, and volunteering.
Next Steps for Our Community
Here are some next steps for our community at Stimpunks:
- Raise funds.
- Raise money to direct into the communities we serve.
- Create ecologies of care.
- Keep people housed, fed, and alive via our aid grants.
- Help people navigate our care systems.
- Provide warm lines and peer respite.
- Defend public education.
- Tell the story: Free, life-changing, and available to everyone.
- Advance progressive education.
- Work with Human Restoration Project, PINE, EALA, Autistic Realms, and others to advance progressive education.
- Continue creating why sheets to assist students, parents, and teachers with their advocacy.
- Advocate for Cavendish Space and Neuroqueer Learning Spaces.
- Tell the story: We’re raising whole children, not Frankenstein children.
- Tell the story: Henry Cavendish, Xerox PARC, and Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes.
- Support creators.
- Grow our creator grants and bring more creators into our Discord community.
- We will need art and competency networks more than ever.
- Build community.
- Bring people into our Discord community.
- Do online events to bring us together and share knowledge.
- Engage in collaborative niche construction at human scale.
- Grow the rhizome by connecting with other cosmo-local bands of marginalized people.
- We will support each other. We will build our own ecologies of care and our own competency networks. We will build communities and network rhizomatically.
- Participate in research.
- Participatory research that aligns with community priorities and values gives us advocacy ammunition to fight back against regressive practices. Participate in studies.
- Tell stories.
- Help build a progressive storytelling ecosystem to offer an alternative to the right-wing ecosystem.
- “The pro-democracy movement needs to build its own funnel, now. It cannot and should not be a mirror image of the right’s funnel. It should be grounded in truth, not lies, and generosity, not closedness. But it needs to be a total media ecology that can meet people at any level of annoyance, curiosity, irritation, gripe, doubt, with any question — and move them toward a more humane and magnanimous view of the world.” —Anand Giridharadas
- Name the systems of power.
- Defuse resentment.
- Increase our impact.
- Consult our Impact page. Consider the things we measure. How can we make those numbers go up?
4 Pathways
Our next steps travel these 4 pathways.
Doing Damns the Darkness
Doing good things, and the right time, can have a remarkable effect. “Doing Damns the Darkness,” for me is more than a phrase on this blog, it’s a reminder to me that I can take action against anxieties and worries and ‘things that go bump in the day’.
Let’s organize our lives around 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
Temple of Broken Dreams by Ezra Furman
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
