Stimpunks Foundation

Mutual Aid and Human-Centered Learning for Neurodivergent and Disabled People

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Direct Support to Individuals: The Cash Movement

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Home » Philosophy » Direct Support to Individuals: The Cash Movement

Poverty is a policy choice. Disabled people are poor because systems are designed to keep them poor — asset limits that punish saving, income rules that punish work, application processes designed to exhaust the people who most need help. One in seven people in the world has a disability. Grants for disabled people constitute just 2% of all human rights funding. These numbers are not a gap. They are a decision.

Direct cash changes what’s possible. It bypasses the bureaucracy designed to gatekeep. It trusts people to know their own needs. It doesn’t require a caseworker’s approval to buy what keeps you regulated, communicating, and alive. Broken systems make people poor. Cash gives people room to navigate broken systems while we work to change them.

We exist for the direct support and mutual aid of neurodivergent and disabled people. Accessing grant funds is challenging and many application processes present barriers to entry for individuals who need to apply for assistance. Our application process is simple. Our direct payments come without strings and have the potential to transform how neurodivergent and disabled people access philanthropic capital.

Direct giving works. Direct giving helps people meet basic needs.

Guaranteed income, sometimes called guaranteed basic income, is a regular cash payment with no strings attached. It seeks to create an ‘income floor’ so that people can meet their basic needs. ‘Universal basic income’ typically refers to a cash payment that is offered to every member of a community whereas a ‘guaranteed income’ is a targeted cash payment for a specific group of people. For our purposes, we’ll refer to ‘the cash movement’ to refer to the overall field for unrestricted direct cash transfers in the U.S.

Crip Coin: Disability, Public Benefits, and Guaranteed Income report

The cash recipients also said they were better able to meet their basic needs.

$750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people – Los Angeles Times

“It may not be earth-shattering that providing money is going to help meet basic needs, but I do think it dispels this myth that people will use money for illicit purposes,” Henwood said. “We weren’t finding that in the study.”

$750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people – Los Angeles Times

3,200 households got $1,000 a month for a year

  • participants were more likely to get full-time jobs
  • more likely to leave domestic abuse
  • more likely to enroll kids in extracurriculars
  • more likely to engage in their communities

Table of Contents

Crip Coin: Disability is an impetus for cash organizing.

Disability is an impetus for cash organizing.

Crip Coin: Disability, Public Benefits, and Guaranteed Income report

The harm is specific. SSI — Supplemental Security Income, the primary federal cash benefit for disabled people — caps assets at $2,000 for an individual. That limit has not been updated since 1989. Saving money disqualifies you. Getting married can disqualify you. Working past a certain threshold can disqualify you. The system is structured to punish the behaviors it claims to encourage: stability, independence, self-sufficiency.

Disabled people learn early that survival requires spending down. You cannot build. You cannot save for a device, an adaptation, a move, an emergency. The benefits cliff — the point at which earning more strips you of the supports you depend on — is not a design flaw. It is the design.

No-strings-attached cash doesn’t trigger asset tests. It doesn’t report to SSA. It doesn’t require a spend-down. For many disabled people, direct cash is the only form of financial support that doesn’t punish them for receiving it.

The history of disability benefits demonstrates the need for no-strings-attached cash assistance.

Crip Coin: Disability, Public Benefits, and Guaranteed Income report

What today’s cash movement is building is what disabled people desperately need but too often can’t access.

Crip Coin: Disability, Public Benefits, and Guaranteed Income report

This population has been exposed to harm in the public benefits system for decades and should be some of the most important people to reach with the transformative power of cash.

Crip Coin: Disability, Public Benefits, and Guaranteed Income report

Given the swell of cash pilots and programs since 2020, GI is well-positioned as a powerful tool to continue this legacy of the ADA.

Crip Coin: Disability, Public Benefits, and Guaranteed Income report

Cash increases agency.

For Autistic and nonspeaking people, cash unlocks access that no service system reliably provides. AAC devices cost thousands of dollars. Insurance denies them routinely. Sensory tools — the headphones, the weighted blankets, the lighting adaptations, the fidgets — are rarely covered. Therapy that is actually affirming, not compliance-based, is almost impossible to access through Medicaid. These are not luxuries. They are the infrastructure of a livable life.

The people who need these things most are also the people most likely to be living on fixed incomes, navigating benefits cliffs, and excluded from the grant processes designed to help them. Cash reaches where systems don’t. It doesn’t require a diagnosis code that fits a reimbursement category. It doesn’t require proving need to someone who has never shared your experience. It arrives and you decide.

Evidence suggests that recipients are not working fewer hours on average because they value work less, but because the cash gave them greater agency to make employment choices that better fit their goals and families’ needs.

Unconditional Cash Study | OpenResearch

Cash increases agency to think about, plan, and pursue goals.

The cash had a positive and significant effect on budgeting and planning for the future, desire to pursue further education, and entrepreneurial interest. Recipients set goals that aligned with their values and desires and many took steps toward achieving them.

Unconditional Cash Study | OpenResearch

The Receipts

The argument against direct cash is always the same. People will waste it. They’ll spend it on the wrong things. They need guidance, oversight, a caseworker between them and the money. This argument is not evidence-based. It is a control mechanism dressed as concern.

The evidence says otherwise. Cash reduces homelessness. Cash reduces food insecurity. Cash increases full-time employment. Cash helps people leave domestic violence. Cash enrolls children in extracurriculars. Cash funds education. Cash funds new businesses. Recipients know what they need. When given the resources to meet those needs, they do.

The receipts:

Poverty Is an Industry

Poverty is not a personal failure. It is a structural condition maintained by institutions with financial stakes in its continuation. The framing of neurodivergent and disabled people as broken — as people who need to be fixed, trained, redeemed — serves those institutions. It justifies the intermediaries. It justifies the application processes. It justifies the industry.

Broken systems produce poverty. The poverty industry responds not by fixing systems but by managing the people systems break. As researchers studying guaranteed income and adult education have documented:

However, this volume of expenditure begs the question why this money was not spent directly on job creation, quality employment of genuine social utility that would permit adequate labour market integration, strengthening a real safety net of minimum income to respond to the needs of the most marginalised. The answer is that, if it were, education for the poor would cease to be a mechanism for their redemption and would no longer offer itself as a business opportunity. For the latter, the education of the poor is a lucrative opportunity that attracts NGOs, enterprises, foundations, associations, and other stakeholders. While some are motivated by altruistic and philanthropic values, others have profit making incentives. In any case, the common denominator is that all of these actors have a stake in the poverty industry. Although they did not create this industry, they nevertheless benefit from its existence, making themselves co-dependent on it and the elimination of poverty inseparable from their eclipse. As such, their incentives lie more with the creation of training courses to fix a vaguely conceptualised skills gap rather than to eliminate poverty.

Guaranteed Minimum Income and Universal Basic Income programs: Implications for adult education

Name the Systems of Power

Direct cash doesn’t exist in isolation. It is a response to a specific constellation of systems, ideologies, and power structures that produce and maintain poverty, exclusion, and harm. Understanding those systems is part of the work.

These are the systems we name. Naming is the beginning of accountability.

Naming the systems is not enough. It is necessary and not sufficient. The systems named above produce real material conditions — poverty, exhaustion, exclusion, crisis — in real people’s lives right now.

Direct cash does not fix the systems. It gives people room. Room to rest. Room to buy the AAC device insurance denied. Room to leave. Room to think past the next week. Room to pursue the goal that’s been waiting behind the emergency that never ends.

Neurodivergent and disabled people are not broken. The systems that underfund, gatekeep, surveil, and exhaust them are broken. Direct cash is a broken-systems intervention. It acknowledges that the barriers are structural. It responds at the scale of the individual because that is where the harm lands.

This is why we do what we do. If you need support, apply here. If you want to make direct support possible for others, contribute here.