Love and care are not soft extras or optional add-ons — they are the infrastructure that makes life possible. For disabled, neurodivergent, and multiply ­marginalized people, survival isn’t a given: it takes regulation, support, connection, trust, and compassion. Yet too often systems treat care as “overhead,” something to minimize in the name of efficiency or productivity.

At Stimpunks, we reject that framing. We see love and care as strategic, collective, and structural forces — the conditions that allow people to show up as themselves, to regulate their nervous systems, to build capacity, and to join in mutual flourishing. In a world that often devalues bodies and minds that don’t conform, love and care are acts of rebellion, resistance, and design.

This page explores what love and care look like when they’re built into how systems operate — not as charity, but as shared survival infrastructure that sustains community, expands access, and affirms dignity for all.

Via our Mission, Creed, Covenant, Philosophy, and Manifesto, we organize our lives around love and care.

Let’s organize our lives around love and care.

Mission

We exist for the direct support and mutual aid of neurodivergent and disabled people.

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

Creed

I center the marginalized and the different. I center edge cases, because edge cases are stress cases and design is tested at the edges. I center neurodivergent and disabled experience in service to all bodyminds.

Covenant

We pledge to act and interact in ways that contribute to an open, welcoming, diverse, inclusive, and healthy community.

Philosophy

We steer by these acquired phrases. They are compasses and stars that align us on our mission.

Interdependence

It is time to celebrate our interdependence. Interdependence acknowledges that our survival is bound up together, that we are interconnected and what you do impacts others. Interdependence is the only way out of most of the most pressing issues we face today.

Edges

Our designs, our societies, and the boundaries of our compassion are tested at the edges, where the truths told are of bias, inequality, injustice, and thoughtlessness.

Manifesto

This is a manifesto that begins but will never end. This is a translation of my world into yours. This is a protest of the notion that there is any correct way to live. We reject neuronormativity and demand the right to learn and live differently.

Love and Care

Let's organize our lives around love and care
Let's write each other letters and call it prayer
Let's congregate in the place that isn't anywhere
At the temple of broken dreams

Ezra Furman – Temple of Broken Dreams Lyrics

Do you ever imagine a world of love and care?
Do you ever imagine a world of love and care?
What would you be doing right now if you lived there?
Human dignity was supposed to be a guarantee for all
For all

Who gets left out of your dream of a good society?
Who gets left out of your dream of a good society?
Who got left out in your dream of a good society?
Dream better
Dream bigger with me

Do you remember a time when you needed love and care?
Do you remember a time when you needed love and care?
You called out for help and no one was there
Love and dignity were supposed to be the priority for us
For us

But you got caught in a bad dream where strength is cruelty
You got caught in a bad dream where strength is cruelty
You got caught in a bad dream of a fucked up way to be
Dream better
Dream bigger
Dream better
Dream bigger with me

Do you ever imagine a world of love and care?
Do you ever imagine a world of love and care?
What would you be doing right now if you lived there?

Micro-Manifesto

Care is not weakness.

It is infrastructure.

Love is not sentimental.

It is structural.

In systems built for efficiency and competition,

care looks inefficient.

Love looks naïve.

But nothing functions without them.

Regulation requires safety.

Growth requires belonging.

Participation requires trust.

We refuse the lie that productivity is primary.

We refuse the myth of the self-made individual.

Care is how we survive bad systems.

Love is how we redesign them.

Love is not soft.

Care is not optional.

They are how we build capacity together.

Read Next

• Human needs, not special needs. — care as ordinary infrastructure, not exceptional treatment.
• Authenticity is our purest freedom. — care as psychological safety and real participation.
• Broken systems, not broken people. — why care work is redesign work.
• It is time to celebrate our interdependence. — care networks beat self-made myths.
• Consent beats compliance. — care without coercion.

Header image credit: Jonathan Y. Eden for Disabled And Here