πŸ“‡ Connect

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
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πŸ’¬ Community starts with conversation.

Need aid, financial or otherwise? Visit our “Request Aid” page.

Need a grant for your work? Visit our “Request Creator Grant” page.

Want to volunteer? Visit our “Volunteer” page.

To say hi or inquire into our services, use this contact form.

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πŸ–– Get in Touch

πŸ” About Us and What We Do With Your Information

Chelsea, Inna, 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. Your information will be entered into our CRM software (HubSpot) and our accounting software (QuickBooks Online) for compliance purposes. Your IP address will be used to geolocate your browsing session. Your “user journey” through our website on the way to submitting the form will be captured. 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 directors: Ryan, Inna, and Chelsea. Our nonprofit consultant and our nonprofit lawyer audit our grants and grant process for ethics and legality.

Middle-aged white man with dark glasses and trimmed brown beard smiles at the camera
Ryan
Bearmouse in Power Wheelchair
Inna
Inna
Chelsea
Chelsea’s badass jellyfish tattoo

Nap Director and Self-care Expert

Doan Lotion Potion

A yawning black and white cat laying on a stone patio
Doan Lotion Potion Yawns Mightily

🌻 Do You Know Why We Have the Sunflowers?

Do you know why we have the sunflowers? It’s not because Vincent van Gogh suffered. It’s because Vincent van Gogh had a brother who loved him. Through all the pain, he had a tether, a connection to the world. And that is the focus of the story we need. Connection.

Hannah Gadsby: Nanette
Close up of sunflower
Do you know why we have the sunflowers?

Rather than connecting with people who are like them only in ascribed characteristics β€” things we mostly acquire from birth, like family, race, and social class (though this one can change throughout one’s life)β€”many people have the opportunity to seek connections with others who share similar interests and motivations. Of course, place, race, family, gender, and social class continue to play a very important role in structuring human relationshipsβ€”but the scope and the scale of their power and their role as a social mechanism have shifted and changed as modernity advanced.

Opportunities to find and make such connections with people based on common interests and viewpoints are thoroughly intertwined with the online architectures of interaction and visibility and the design of online platforms. These factorsβ€”the affordances of digital spacesβ€”shape who can find and see whom, and under what conditions; not all platforms create identical environments and opportunities for connection. Rather, online platforms have architectures just as our cities, roads, and buildings do, and those architectures affect how we navigate them. (Explored in depth in later chapters.) If you cannot find people, you cannot form a community with them.

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (p. 10-11). Yale University Press

πŸ”­πŸ«€πŸ§  We Find Our People and Co-create Ecologies of Care

In Te Reo Māori the word for Autistic ways of being is Takiwātanga, which means “in their own space and time”. Most Autists are not born into healthy Autistic families. We have to co-create our Autistic families in our own space and time.

A communal definition of Autistic ways of being

Until one day… you find a whole world of people who understand.

The internet has allowed autistic people- who might be shut in their homes, unable to speak aloud, or unable to travel independently- to mingle with each other, share experiences, and talk about our lives to people who feel the same way.

We were no longer alone.

7 Cool Aspects of Autistic Culture Β» NeuroClastic
“Find Your People” by Swamburger of Mugs and Pockets

Autistic kids need access to autistic communities. They need access to autistic mentors. They need to know that the problems they go through are actually common for many of us! They need to know they are not alone. They need to know that they matter and people care about them. They need to see autistic adults out in the world being accommodated and understood and respected. They need to learn how to understand their own alexithymia and their own emotions. They need to be able to recognize themselves in others. They need to be able to breathe.

AutisticSciencePerson

Opening doors has become my calling.


Welcome to this house.


Find your people.

All Hail Open Doors, Swamburger and Scarlet Monk of Mugs and Pockets

Generally punks can agree to the loose notion that β€œpunk is an attitude/ individuality is the key.” It was a yearning to be different, to distance oneself from the mainstream mass of society. But punk was also a desire for community, a hunger for fellowship with like-minded souls…

Dissertation or Thesis | We accept you, one of us?: punk rock, community, and individualism in an uncertain era, 1974-1985
Are you awake or are you sleeping?
Are you afraid? We've been waiting for this meeting

We have come here for you, and we're coming in peace
Mothership will take you on higher, higher
This world you live in is not a place for someone like you
Come on, let us take you home

There is a flaw in man-made matters
But you are pure, and we have to get you out of here

--A Different Kind of Human by AURORA

I believe all persons with Autism need the opportunity to become friends with other Autistic people. Without this contact we feel alien to this world. We feel lonely. Feeling like an alien is a slow death. It’s sadness, self-hate, it’s continuously striving to be someone we’re not. It’s waking up each day and functioning in falsehood (French, 1993).

Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking

When I meet other people, β€˜autistic’ or not, there is something instinctive in me that looks for where systems in them match systems in me.
When I am around non-autistic people I soon know they function according to a generally alien system of functioning that makes little match with my own. I know this is because they are essentially multi-track and I am essentially mono.

Autism: An Inside-Out Approach: An Innovative Look at the β€˜Mechanics’ of β€˜Autism’ and its Developmental β€˜Cousins’ by Donna Williams

We call ourselves Warriors and Weirdos.

Aurora Aksnes

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Table of Contents

Intro

Art and Announcements

About Us

Mutual Aid

Featured Artists

Human-Centered Learning

Space

Research

Services

Mission & Philosophy

We serve our loved people so we can keep on livin‘ through the onslaught.

Help us and join us by reading on, and reframing.

Rock N’ Roller by Kyle Duce

Staying alive is a lot of work for a disabled person in an ableist society…

DISABILITY VISIBILITY: FIRST PERSON STORIES FROM THE 21ST CENTURY
This is your time, this is your life and
This is your time, this is your life and
You gotta keep on (Keep on livin!)
Gotta keep on (Keep on livin!)
You gotta keep on (Keep on livin!)

Disability justice (and disability itself) has the potential to fundamentally transform everything we think about quality of life, purpose, work, relationships, belonging.

DISABILITY VISIBILITY: FIRST-PERSON STORIES FROM THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

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We exist as friction. The work that we do; it’s wildly painful.