Stimpunks Field Guide:
A Punk Codex of Community Care & Applied Learning
A Carryable Compendium of Coping and Collaboration, Concisely Considered, for Sustainably Surviving at Human Scale Through Collaborative Niche Construction at the Edges
This is not a manual. This is not a rulebook. This is a living document forged in the margins, scrawled in the spaces between what’s allowed and what’s necessary, built by bodyminds that refused to wait for permission.
What you hold is a codex—part survival guide, part battle plan, part love letter to everyone who’s been told they don’t fit. We’ve collected our hard-won knowledge: the workarounds, the shortcuts, the mutual aid networks, the tools that actually work when the systems designed to help us don’t. This is applied learning born from necessity, community care distilled into actionable practice.
The punk ethos runs through every section: DIY or die. Nothing about us without us. No gods, no masters, no gatekeepers. We document how we communicate, how we cope, how we build technology that serves us instead of surveilling us. We map out our rights because knowing them is the first act of resistance. We create accessibility guides because access is solidarity made concrete.
This guide exists at human scale—small enough to carry, specific enough to use, honest enough to trust. From onboarding new members to navigating hostile venues, from markdown syntax to meltdown management, these are the protocols that keep us alive and fighting. Each checklist is a small rebellion. Each procedure is proof we built something that works for us.
Walk in our shoes. Not as tourism, not as inspiration porn, but as an invitation to collaborative niche construction at the edges where we’ve found ways to thrive. This is how we sustainably survive. This is how we care for each other when care is both political act and daily practice.
Grab what you need. Add what you’ve learned. Pass it on. That’s the punk way.
Welcome to the Field Guide. Welcome to the fight. Welcome home.
Each section below has its own index, and that index is the authoritative list — we stopped duplicating page listings here because a hand-kept list of a growing tree is a list that lies. What follows is a few things worth reading from each, chosen rather than enumerated.
Orienting
Start here if you are new, or if you are bringing someone in. Welcome Aboard: Start Here is the front door: what we are, how we work, and what nobody is going to ask you to explain about yourself.
Onboarding here is not a probation period. It is us telling you how the place works so you can stop guessing — because guessing is expensive, and it is the tax we most want to stop charging people.
Communication
Communication is oxygen, so we are distributed, text-first, and asynchronous by default. Our Communication Stack covers what we use and, more to the point, why: a meeting is a synchronous tax on everyone who cannot be present and articulate at two in the afternoon, and most of what happens in one could have been written down.
Writing scales across time zones, energy levels, and bad days. That is why we write in Markdown — plain text that outlives every app you will ever read it in — why team chat is arranged so nobody has to be always-on to stay included, and why even our hashtags are a system rather than decoration.
None of this is a stylistic preference. Real-time-only communication excludes people, and we are the people it excludes.
IT
Our technology choices are access decisions, not support tickets. The Accessibility pages are the most immediately useful thing in this section: how to turn on ear-reading so your browser reads a page aloud to you, how to get live captions system-wide, and how to drive a Mac by voice when typing is not available today.
Underneath sits the boring, load-bearing stuff — Backup and Passwords — and the thing we have written most about: The Stimpunks Knowledge System, how we keep our own institutional memory so that one person’s bad month is not an outage.
If you want one of your own, Start Your Own Knowledge Garden is the on-ramp and its first step needs no software at all, while Filling the Garden covers how things actually get in — clipping the web, writing notes, and never touching a terminal.
Operations
The paperwork that makes mutual aid legal, repeatable, and survivable. Legal covers our nonprofit obligations. Forms is the actual filing cabinet — donations, contractor agreements, media releases, and the Meeting Your Needs request form, which is how someone asks for what they need without having to justify it. Onboard Contractor is how a person gets paid without a week of email.
Administration is not overhead here. It is how the mission actually gets done, and we default to open about it on purpose — publishing your own operations is how a small organisation stays accountable, and how the next person avoids reinventing a process somebody already worked out.
Editorial
How we write, and the rules we hold ourselves to. The House Style Guide is the reference: identity-first language, Autistic and Disabled capitalised, and a standing refusal to sand the anger out of a first-person account. It carries the mechanics too — punctuation, a contributor checklist, and what makes content neurodiversity-friendly rather than merely tidy.
Rolling Our Own is the other half, and the harder one. Not the mechanics but the reasoning: why this site is built from scavenged parts and other people’s words, why it is a garden rather than a stream, and why so much of it is quotation. The mechanics have their own page — Page Conventions — and the ethics of whose story it is run through both.
Design
Design as an access practice rather than decoration. Color & Palette: Our Solarized System documents the actual palette and why it is tuned for comfort in both light and dark instead of maximum punch — because a page has to be readable on a bad day, not just in a screenshot.
This is where house decisions get written down as we make them. The outward-facing work lives elsewhere: The Stimpunks Design Method is our framework for designing neurodivergent environments, and The GRADE EtD Framework and Stimpunks is the evidence standard we hold interventions to.
Fundraising
Where the money comes from and what it is for. Our approach for 2026 explains how we ask, and the goal stack lays out what each tier actually pays for — in public, with numbers.
A small nonprofit asking people for money owes them legibility about what happens to it. That is the whole reason these pages are not a private spreadsheet.
Coping
The largest section here, and the one most likely to be useful to you today. Cope Is Not an Insult sets the frame: coping is skilled work, not a personal failing to be corrected. The Science of Cope is the evidence underneath that claim.
Then the practical layers. A Sensory Kit you can actually assemble. The Seeds of Cope pages — small, specific, borrowable practices, including a set for classrooms. Guides to sitting, standing, walking, rolling, hauling and relaxing when a body does not do those things for free. And This Chronic Bodymind for pain and fatigue that do not resolve on a schedule.
If you run a school or a team, the Regulation-First Discipline Framework is our answer to behaviourism: what to do instead of escalating control when a young person is in distress.
DEI-AB
Before We Begin is the honest opener — what we mean by belonging, and why work that stops at representation never arrives there.
The most-used page in this section is Know Your Rights, These Are Your Rights, because knowing them is the first act of resistance. Determining a Good Autism Organization is the one to hand somebody who has just been given a leaflet by a charity that does not employ any Autistic people. And every April, Navigating Autism Acceptance Month and Autism Myths saves us writing the same explanations again.
Venues
Specific places, specifically assessed. We keep working notes on venues in Austin and Dripping Springs — what the entrance is actually like, where the quiet is, whether the bathroom works for a wheelchair, how loud it gets once the room fills up.
This is deliberately not a rating system. It is field notes, because “accessible” on a venue’s own website means almost nothing, and “three steps at the door and no handrail” means everything.
Events
Our Events Philosophy comes first, because every logistical decision follows from it: a gathering nobody can leave comfortably is not hospitality.
The Event Access Guide is the operational core — the access survey we send before anyone travels, the air quality we take seriously because some of our people cannot risk a room, and interaction badges so you can signal how much social contact you want without having to explain yourself to strangers.
The Covenant is what we ask of everyone who comes. Infodumplings is a format we invented: infodumping as the entire point, rather than something to apologise for afterwards. And the Packing List is what we have learned to actually bring.