Staying alive is a lot of work for a disabled person in an ableist society…
DISABILITY VISIBILITY: FIRST PERSON STORIES FROM THE 21ST CENTURY
Fellow neurodivergent and disabled people, when requesting financial aid for your welfare and survival, help us get to know you.
Please use the form below to initiate your aid request. All of your information is private and is used solely for evaluating the request and our internal compliance processes. It will not be marketed or sold.
Unfortunately we can not provide requests to minors without guardian approval. We are also limited to US residents only.
The way our mutual aid works is we do it once a month, about one week before the end of the month. We have a board meeting and select the grantees for that month, and then we will send out an email letting you know if you have been selected or not. You can receive up to 3 grants per year, and each grant is up to US$500. If you are not selected for a certain month, you may resubmit the following month.
If you are selected, we will need to verify your identity before sending the funds. This can be done in a quick video where you just hold a photo I.D. up and we verify it is you. If video verification is not an option, you can text or email a selfie holding up your I.D. (this information will only be used for the purpose of verifying your identity). Also if you have a deadname we can work with that.
We consider requests on a monthly basis. We will always get back to you on the status of your request. We would like to approve all requests and offer larger, more impactful grants, and as our donor and funding outreach grows, we hope to reach that goal.
Anxious? We’re neurodivergent and disabled and have huge form anxiety from filling out forms to prove, over and over, our disability and neurodivergence. Don’t worry about getting it wrong. Tell your story how you can.
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
Burned out? Burnout is a common theme in requests we receive. Some of us at Stimpunks have experienced career-ending burnout. We’d like to buy you some time to recover.
Here’s a passage from our burnout page from Ryan, talking about his episodes of burnout.
I’ve experienced several moments of burnout in my life and career. Being something that I neurologically am not is exhausting. Wearing the mask of neurotypicality drains my batteries and melts my spoons. For a long time, for decades, I didn’t fully understand what was going on with me. I didn’t understand the root causes of my cycles of burnout. Finding the Actually Autistic community online woke me to the concept of autistic burnout. When I found the community writing excerpted below, I finally understood an important part of myself. Looking back on my life, I recognized those periods when coping mechanisms had stopped working and crumbled. I recognized my phases and changes as continuous fluid adaptation.
These periods of burnout caused problems at school and work. I would lose executive function and self-care skills. My capacity for sensory and social overload dwindled to near nothing. I avoided speaking and retreated from socializing. I was spent. I couldn’t maintain the facade anymore. I had to stop and pay the price.
🔥 Autistic Burnout: The Cost of Masking and Passing – Stimpunks Foundation
Our form to request aid has four parts:
- First, we ask for contact information.
- Then we ask for your social media. This is optional but helpful in us getting to know each other.
- Then we ask you to describe your need and tell your story however you can.
- Finally, we show you a preview of your submission so you can review and revise before you submit.
Please read the data collection and privacy disclosure below the form before submitting your information.
🔐 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.
About your information:
- Your information will be entered into our forms software (WPForms and WordPress).
- A subset of that information will go to our CRM software (HubSpot).
- A subset of that will go to our accounting software (QuickBooks Online) if you receive money from us.
- This data retention is solely for legal compliance purposes. We will not sell or give your data to third parties. We will not use your information to market anything to you.
- Your IP address will be used to geolocate your browsing session. Our software does not allow turning off IP address collection.
- If you are concerned with us having your IP address, use a VPN.
- If your IP address is outside the United States, we will ask you to confirm you are in the United States. We’ll take your word for it and never ask you to unmask your IP.
- 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.
- Periodically, nonprofit lawyers and consultants will have access to some information in order to audit our processes for ethics and legality.
- We delete your form submission and any documents you attach after determining whether to send you a grant or not. We consider personal information a toxic asset and don’t want to keep more of your data than we have to.
- We will also delete your information from our systems upon request.
- However, if you get a grant from us we do have to retain contact information about who we gave to and the amount given. We retain this contact information for 3 years as required by the Internal Revenue Service.
Nap Director and Self-care Expert
Doan Lotion Potion
