Impact is not a scorecard.
Impact is change that makes life better for people in real conditions.
At Stimpunks, we don’t measure success by outputs alone — not by how many pages we published, how many words we wrote, or how many clicks we get. Those are just activity markers.
We measure impact by usefulness, dignity enabled, harm reduced, and access expanded — because a tool that sits on a shelf doesn’t shift anything, but a resource that helps someone breathe easier, survive a system, or reframe their life matters.
This page shares how we think about impact — not with vanity metrics or compliance numbers — but with stories, evidence, and frameworks that make sense to the people who use our work in their lives: educators, caregivers, designers, organizers, and community members.
Here, you’ll find:
- what “impact” means to us
- how we try to assess it
- examples of meaningful uptake and change
- reflections on where we fell short
- and how we’re learning from the work itself
Impact is not passive.
It’s something that grows out of real use, real feedback, and real transformation.
Welcome to how we track change that matters.
Change that is felt, not just counted.
Metrics
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Aid Grants
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Creator Grants
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Mutual Aid Dollars
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Creator Dollars
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Total Dollars
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Events
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Web Pages
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Website Views per Month
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Citations in Google Scholar
Social Media Followers
Stats updated October 23, 2025
Mutual Aid Grants
Mutual aid is not a side project. It’s care infrastructure.
Mutual Aid Grants are direct support for disabled and neurodivergent people navigating systems that routinely withhold what we need to survive: stable housing, healthcare, assistive tools, sensory safety, rest, and time.
We don’t treat mutual aid as charity. We treat it as solidarity — community members meeting human needs that institutions ignore or gatekeep.
These grants are small, immediate interventions that can make the difference between collapse and continuity. They are part of how we resist the idea that survival is an individual responsibility in an ableist world.
Mutual aid is how we keep each other alive at the edges.
We send out one to four US$500 mutual aid grants a month to help keep people housed, fed, connected, and alive. The number we send out depends on our current funding level.
Thank you so much @stimpunks for supporting & believing in me & my artwork.
It’s okay to be you. It’s okay to be different. It’s okay to have a disability. Never give up on yourself.
Jasmine Slater
If y’all care about me, read what @stimpunks is saying.
Liana McCrea
Huge thank you to @stimpunks for this generator so if we lose power, the oxygen concentrator can still run! I can’t thank you enough!!
Karrie Higgins
I want to say thank you and tell you you made a big difference in someone’s life today. I can’t stop crying. I’ve never felt understood or seen like this before. I’m desperately looking for community, perspective, support, tools to survive and feel backed into a corner.
I’m honestly in tears right now because of you guys.
Thank you so, so much for caring about my family. Thank you for sharing your kindness & support.
I want to say thank you and tell you you made a big difference in someone’s life today. I can’t stop crying. I’ve never felt understood or seen like this before. I’m desperately looking for community, perspective, support, tools to survive and feel backed into a corner.
Thank you for reaching out! I’m doing well – thanks to your generosity as well as some other donations I was fortunate to receive, I was able to trade my car for a van and order a lift for the wheelchair! The lift won’t be here until the end of March, but I’m SO excited to finally be free to use my wheelchair out in the world! Thank you SO much for your donation!!
Thank you so much for reaching out and I cannot express how grateful I am to have been selected! This is going to be a massive weight lifted off my shoulders!
Thank you so much for the support. I truly appreciate it! It’s really nice to connect with others who “get it” too!
I can’t believe how incredible y’all are. I’m in tears. This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me like this.
Oh my gosh, thank you SO MUCH! This is truly amazing!
Extremely blessed to be able to get my procedure and medication. Huge thank you to @stimpunks. I’m honestly in tears, thank you guys so much.
Thank you so much. This is exactly what I needed right when I needed it. Y’all are heros. I appreciate your help.
Thank you all so very much! This is a very beautiful thing your team is doing and gives me hope for our society.
Deeply appreciative of this and all of you at Stimpunks, thank you so much! This is an extremely impactful relief.
Again, thank you so much for everything you’ve provided. Stimpunks is doing wonderful work. Our needs may be great, but our gratitude when we receive what we need is even greater. 💕
Thank you so deeply for your help and for your care of others.
My partner told me about you and when I saw your mission page I cried for like an hour because it resonated so strongly.
It shocked me, humbled me, and made me wonder how you were able to do what you did for me!
You made someone struggling alone feel a little better and less lonely today.
Creator Grants
Disabled and neurodivergent creators are constantly asked to share their stories for free, educate for free, advocate for free — while systems profit from our labor and erase our expertise.
Creator Grants are our way of doing something different.
We fund writers, artists, educators, and builders who are creating disability justice knowledge, access tools, and neurodivergent cultural work. We believe lived experience is not “content.” It is expertise. It deserves compensation.
Creator grants help people make work on their own terms — with autonomy, pacing, and dignity — instead of burning out inside extractive systems.
We don’t just platform voices. We pay them.
We send out five US$3,000 creator grants per year to support the work of neurodivergent and disabled creators.
Our grantees make cool stuff. Read about them on our “Creators” page.
Community Events
Community doesn’t happen automatically. It has to be made possible.
Stimpunks community events are spaces for connection, learning, and mutual recognition — designed with sensory access, flexible participation, and neurodivergent sociality in mind.
These gatherings aren’t about networking or performance. They are about being real with each other, sharing tools, telling the truth, and building relationships that reduce isolation.
Events can include:
- workshops and teach-ins
- informal meetups
- collaborative design sessions
- zine-making and storytelling
- access-centered community practice
We build events as Cavendish Spaces: places where people can regulate, contribute, and belong without forced compliance.
We put on multiple events with our community every year. Our learners help us plan and execute these events.
Learning Space
Stimpunks is building toward a different kind of learning space — one designed for real minds, real bodies, and real lives.
A Stimpunks learning space is not built around sorting, punishment, or compliance. It is built around:
- psychological safety
- sensory access
- self-determination
- collaborative niche construction
- varied developmental timelines
- spiky profiles and nonlinear growth
We believe students are not deficits to remediate. They are people to support.
Learning should feel like dignity, not endurance.
This work is about designing environments where neurodivergent learners can thrive without being asked to disappear.
We provide learning space online and offline for our community.
“Stimpunks is an essential resource for educators.”
Ira Socol, co-author of Timeless Learning
“Stimpunks is a creative, thriving community that is vital to connecting and learning. We must critically examine our classrooms to build neurodiversity-friendly spaces. Stimpunks gives us the tools to do so.”
Human Restoration Project
Open Research
Open research means we do not hide knowledge behind paywalls, jargon, or institutional gatekeeping.
Stimpunks produces and curates public-facing research grounded in lived experience, disability justice, and epistemic pluralism. We translate complex ideas into usable tools: briefs, glossaries, checklists, pattern languages.
Our research is:
- accessible
- community accountable
- openly published
- oriented toward practice, not prestige
We are not interested in the conquering gaze from nowhere. We are interested in knowledge that helps people survive, understand themselves, and build better systems.
Open research is mutual aid for the mind.
Our website is like Wikipedia because it effectively is an encyclopedia. It’s chock full of answers and knowledge and experience on living in this world as neurodivergent and disabled people.
Learn about yourself.
Learn about your family.
Learn about your friends, co-workers, patients, and students.
We offer lots of free resources for navigating our current society and building a more inclusive society.
We offer validation for thirsty souls yearning to be seen, heard, and understood.
We offer words on your behalf, ones which call out to include you.
We offer community and belonging.
There are 1,300 pages to explore in our encyclopedia of disability and difference. We are building a global knowledge commons, at the edges. Our glossary, library, courses, why sheets, learning pathways, and field guide are vast. Visit our site map for lists of our most popular articles and our many collections.
A search for “Stimpunks” on Google Scholar yields 65 results. We’ve been cited pretty broadly. It’s always interesting to see where our work ends up.
Congrats Stimpunks Community. Our messages are getting out there. As we state for our “Open Research” pillar:
We improve the scientific experience for the disabled and the neurodivergent by restoring the humanities. We bring voice into empirical constructs and translate voice into academic comprehension.
Stimpunks
We’re succeeding at that aspiration.
Administration
As part of our mission, we hire neurodivergent and disabled people and invest in their professional development. We don’t think of administrative costs as “overhead”, though we are mindful of how much we spend. We consider administrative costs a component of our mission. We pay living wages to those who help us run the organization. We include folks in our software subscriptions so that they have the tools to do work.
Administration is not overhead. It is stewardship.
Operations are how we keep the work accountable, sustainable, and real.
Administration includes:
- governance and compliance
- financial transparency and reporting
- donor privacy and ethical fundraising
- infrastructure for accessibility
- paying people fairly
- maintaining public documentation
Disabled-led organizations need durable systems, not hustle and burnout.
We build operations that serve the mission — and we default to open whenever possible, so community members and supporters can see how resources move and how decisions get made.
Care requires infrastructure. Accountability is part of care.
Closing Thoughts
Impact is not a number alone.
Impact is:
- a grant that keeps someone housed
- a creator who gets paid instead of extracted
- a sensory checklist that makes an event survivable
- a learning space that stops punishing difference
- an open resource that gives someone language for their life
We build impact at the edges — where it’s felt.
Donate
One in seven persons in the world has a disability. Yet, grants for persons with disabilities constitute just 2% of all human rights funding.
Human Rights Funders Network – Reversing the trend: The time is now to fund disability rights
Why donate to us? The nonprofit professionals who consult us tell us we’re unique. They tell us we’re tearing down walls in philanthropy…
1. Your money goes directly to people, not bureaucracy
Stimpunks practices mutual aid, not charity theater. Donations are moved quickly and with low barriers to neurodivergent and disabled people who need relief now—for rent, food, care, survival. This prevents crises before they become emergencies, which is both more humane and more effective than downstream interventions.
Impact: Immediate stabilization, reduced stress, fewer crisis escalations.
2. Stimpunks fixes conditions, not people
Most systems are built around compliance: behave correctly, mask well, suffer quietly, and maybe you’ll get help. Stimpunks rejects that model entirely. It invests in access, psychological safety, and autonomy, which research and lived experience both show lead to better long-term outcomes.
Your donation supports:
- Communication access
- Sensory and space access
- Education and healthcare access
- Environments where people don’t have to erase themselves to survive
3. It’s led by the people most affected
Stimpunks is neurodivergent- and disabled-led. That means:
- No guessing what people need
- No extractive storytelling
- No top-down “solutions” that create harm
Lived experience isn’t a side note here—it’s the operating system.
Result: Higher relevance, higher trust, higher impact per dollar.
4. It prevents harm instead of managing fallout
Compliance-based therapies, inaccessible systems, and deficit narratives cost people their health, education, jobs, and lives. Stimpunks intervenes upstream by:
- Publishing open, neuroaffirming learning pathways
- Challenging harmful practices
- Giving families, educators, and professionals better tools
Prevention is cheaper, kinder, and more effective than repair.
5. Your donation creates compounding impact
Stimpunks doesn’t just help individuals—it builds shared infrastructure:
- Free learning resources used globally
- Language and frameworks that change how people think and act
- Community knowledge that outlives any single grant
One donation helps one person and strengthens the ecosystem that supports thousands more.
6. This is accountability without gatekeeping
Stimpunks operates with transparency, low overhead, and a clear ethical spine. There’s no pressure to sanitize stories or soften the truth to appease funders. Donations support honest work rooted in dignity, not optics.
7. Because people shouldn’t have to mask to deserve care
At the deepest level, donating to Stimpunks is a values decision.
It says:
- People are not broken
- Difference is not a defect
- Care should never be conditional on conformity
Authenticity is our purest freedom—and freedom requires resources.
Bottom line
If you want your money to:
- Reach people fast
- Reduce harm instead of rebranding it
- Support work led by those who live it
- Build something real, not polite
Donate to Stimpunks.org.
Your donations help us serve our loved people so we can keep on living through the onslaught.
Double your impact. Many employers match donations through Benevity and similar platforms.
Accountability Is Care
We don’t do mystery charity. We work in public, publish our policies, and show where the money goes — because trust is part of access.
- Accountability & Transparency Hub
- Where the Money Went (2025)
- Program/Admin/Fundraising Expense Policy
- Annual Reports
- Donor Privacy Policy
- Frequently Requested Information
Donate if you can. Share if you can’t. Either way, thank you for building access with us.
