Stimpunks Foundation

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

Cat sitting on white chair in front of abstract at resembling pillars

Pillars

Abstract, algorithmic art resembling a mothership lifting off on rainbow propulsion

We have to challenge the norm and change the narrative around people who are neurodivergent or disabled.

We do that with our Four Pillars.

⛑📚 Our Pillars 🗂🧰

A young woman looks up toward images flowing from an open book with pages riffling

Learning Space

The place where we belong does not exist. We will build it. Anti-ableist space for passion-based, human-centered learning compatible with neurodiversity and the social model of disability.

A green-skinned humanoid with 10 arms and a tree sprouting out of its open heads holds 10 objects: paintbrush, magnifying glass, book, stopwatch, smoking herbs, broom, smartphone, mortar

Open Research

Digital sociology, neurodiversity studies, disability studies, and syncretism, in the open. Improving science by restoring the humanities. We bring voice into empirical constructs and translate voice into academic comprehension.

A group of disabled queer Black folks talk and laugh at a sleepover, relaxing across two large beds. Everyone is dressed in colorful t-shirts and wearing a variety of sleep scarves, bonnets, and durags. On the left, two friends sit on one bed and paint each other’s nails. On the right, four people lounge on a bed: one person braids another’s hair while the third friend wearing a C-PAP mask laughs, and the fourth person looks up from their book. In the center, a bedside lamp illuminates the room in warm light while pill bottles adorn an end table.

Mutual Aid

Staying alive is a lot of work for a disabled person in an ableist society. We provide real help against the onslaught through mutual aid. We believe that direct support to individuals is the most effective approach to alleviating the barriers and challenges that prevent neurodivergent and disabled people from thriving.

Stimpunks Creator Badge An umbrella inside a circle surrounded by the text "Stimpunks Creator" with rainbow stripes in between

Creator Grants

We pay creators to create. We fund art, advocacy, research, and more. We buy space to breathe and create.

Through Stimpunks Foundation, we:

  1. Offer financial and mutual aid;
  2. Hire our community members as consultants;
  3. Provide a learning space designed for our community; and
  4. Support our community’s open research efforts.
Vector drawing of power wheelchair with rainbow umbrella
Black and white umbrella with a handle shaped like a capital letter U

Stimpunks Foundation sponsors and employs neurodivergent and disabled creators and amplifies their work to our clients and throughout society. We exist for the direct support and mutual aid of neurodivergent and disabled people.

We complement mutual aid to creators with learning spaces for creators. Stimpunks Foundation serves neurodivergent and disabled people unserved by public and private schools. Via equity, access, empathy, and inclusivity, we build community learning space respectful of all types of bodyminds.

We pursue passion-based, human-centered learning compatible with neurodiversity and the social model of disability. We create paths to equity and access for our learners. We create Cavendish space of peer respite and collaborative niche construction where we can find relief from an intense world designed against us.

Our research initiative focuses on the sweet spot of digital sociology, neurodiversity studies, disability studies, and syncretism, in the open. We want to improve the scientific experience for the disabled and the neurodivergent by restoring the humanities. We want to bring voice into empirical constructs and translate voice into academic comprehension.

A woman in a blue dress gazes out of a window out a window. Waves of yellow and pink expand from her gaze out into the world.
“Monotropism” by Betsy Selvam is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
A blue humanoid wearing a yellow Star Trek uniform sits alone on a bench accompanied by their belongings. A space scene with a path into they sky is in the background
“Time traveling” by Heike Blakley is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

We also help businesses and organizations increase their knowledge and practice of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) by analyzing company practices and coaching leaders to dismantle ableism in their spaces. According to the Harvard Business Review, “There are more than one billion people worldwide – around 15% of the population – living with a disability. As workers, they can ease talent shortages and add to the organizational diversity that drives better decision-making and innovation.” Neurodiversity-friendly forms of collaboration hold the potential to transform pathologically competitive and toxic teams and cultures into highly collaborative teams and larger cultural units that work together easier and with more success.

Our additional services include digital and physical accessibility audits, sensitivity reads, and other offerings that focus on increasing DEI in the workplace. Client services are how we live our mission to employ neurodivergent and disabled people as well as how we raise capital for grantmaking.

A blue humanoid sits cross-legged holding an Earth-like sphere
“God is a woman” by Heike Blakley is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Our four pillars rest on the four pillars of the ADA.

In 1990, the ADA, which today remains the cornerstone of disability civil rights law in the United States, established four goals for disabled Americans: equal opportunity, independent living, full participation, and economic self-sufficiency.

Economic Justice Is Disability Justice

Our four pillars embed a Disability Economic Justice Policy Framework.

Rather than tinkering at the edges, we believe the time is now for a high-level, values-based disability economic justice framework to inform and guide the development and implementation of policy making with a disability lens—across issue areas and traditional silos, in recognition that every issue is a disability issue—to realize the vision of economic security for all disabled people in the United States.

How to Embed a Disability Economic Justice Policy Framework in Domestic Policy Making
Every Disabled Person:

The Disability Economic Justice Policy Framework is intended to be used by all and shared widely as a guide for policy development. Its applicability includes federal policy making in Congress, the White House, and across federal agencies; at the state and local levels; as well as at policy and advocacy organizations that shape policy making. Whether you are an advocate, policymaker, funder, practitioner, or researcher, the goal is to find yourself within the framework and use the values it articulates to bring a disability policy lens to your work.

Every Disabled Person:

  • can live free from disability-based discrimination, as well as discrimination based on multiply marginalized and intersecting identities such as race, gender (including sexual orientation and gender identity), immigration status, and religion;
  • has accessible, affordable, stable, safe, and quality housing;
  • has access to reliable, affordable, and accessible transportation;
  • can live independently, with dignity, access to support in the community, and access to culturally and linguistically appropriate care and services at their direction;
  • has access to the health care they need, when they need it, and from the providers they want to be served by, including primary and specialist health care, sexual and reproductive health care, dental care, mental health care, medication, telehealth, and emergency care;
  • has access to adequate, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food;
  • is provided a high-quality, equitable education in an inclusive educational setting, from early childhood to post-secondary education, including an affordable higher education;
  • can find and retain equitable employment at competitive wages, in integrated settings, and with appropriate accommodations and paid leave, including access to self-employment and entrepreneurship opportunities;
  • has direct, equitable pathways to attain economic security and mobility through building wealth and savings;
  • has access to an equitable public benefits system that provides a robust social safety net adequate to ensure a basic, dignified standard of living and free from intrusive barriers to work, savings, and marriage;
  • is provided fair and equitable access to and treatment by the American legal system, including through civil, criminal, immigration, and family courts; court fines and fees; and the right to support for legal decision-making and the right to counsel as a reasonable accommodation;
  • can engage in civic participation by voting and engaging in the democratic process with appropriate accommodations provided equitably and fairly;
  • is centered in emergency and disaster planning, as well as climate change sustainability and other infrastructure discussions, to ensure accessible and inclusive solutions for the future of the United States; and
  • has access to and can fully engage with affordable technologies at home, in the community, and at work, including broadband and assistive technologies that keep pace with the rapidly changing technology of the times, while ensuring freedom from surveillance when engaging with such technology.
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Source: How to Embed a Disability Economic Justice Policy Framework in Domestic Policy Making

Economic Justice Is Disability Justice

Our four pillars reframe disability and difference.

Why We Reframe

  1. 🌈♿️ Mutual Aid and Human-Centered Learning for Neurodivergent and Disabled People (9 minutes)
  2. Reframe Disability and Difference: We’re Going to Rewrite the Narratives (14 minutes)
  3. Happy Flappy (7 minutes)
  4. Pillars (3 minutes)

Reframe Aid

  1. ⛑ Mutual Aid: Real Help Against the Onslaught (13 minutes)
  2. ☂️ Community Care (10 minutes)

Reframe Learning

  1. ♿️📚The Need: Anti-Ableist Space for Human-Centered Learning (16 minutes)
  2. ❤️ The Answer: Reframing, Respectful Connection, and the Presumption of Competence (33 minutes)
  3. ⚡️🦅🌈 The Feeling: Electric Belonging and Soaring Inclusion (4 minutes)
  4. 📚 The Learning: Passion-Based, Human-Centered Learning Compatible With Neurodiversity and the Social Model of Disability (10 minutes)
  5. The Gift: Learning Disabilities Reframed (18 minutes)

Reframe Research

  1. 🗂 Facts, Fire, and Feels: Research-Storytelling from the Edges (38 minutes)
  2. Questions for an Industry: Are You Disregarding Harm and Profiting From Our Misery? ( 17 minutes)
  3. Participatory, Emancipatory, Activist Research (29 minutes)
  4. Useful Autism Research: Welcome to This Very Important Update (31 minutes)

Reframe Services

  1. 🧰✊ Services: Know Our Rights, These Are Our Rights (12 minutes)

Take The Reframer’s Journey

We reframe to serve our loved people so we can keep on livin’ through the onslaught.

I would like to honour all the autistic people who survive the care system somehow.

All those who survive extreme ‘therapy’.

All those who are brought to their knees, reading hellish descriptions of their loved people.

And all who did not survive this onslaught.

Ann Memmott PGC🌈 on Twitter
Look up to the sky, sky, sky
Take back your own tonight
You'll find more than you see
It's time now, now, get ready
This is your time, this is your life and
This is your time, this is your life and
This is your time, this is your life and
This is your time, this is your life and
You gotta keep on (Keep on livin!)
Gotta keep on (Keep on livin!)
You gotta keep on (Keep on livin!)
Gotta keep on (Keep on livin!)
You gotta keep on (Keep on livin!)
Gotta keep on (Keep on livin!)
You gotta keep on (Keep on livin!)
Gotta keep on (Keep on livin!)

Keep On Livin' by Le Tigre

My kids have been kicked out of many, many places for being different—just like I was.

The question is simple: Is there room for disabled kids at a piano school? On a swim team? In most classrooms?

The answer, right now, seems to be no.

Catapult | The World Doesn’t Bend for Disabled Kids (or Disabled Parents)

We have protests to stage, driven by the fuel of our righteous anger. We have speeches to make, written from the soaring pleas of our individual and collective trauma, and our wildest dreams of joy and freedom and love. We have cultural narratives to rewrite because they really do hate us and they really will kill us, and if we’re going to rewrite the narratives, then there’s no reason to hold ourselves back from our most radical and defiant rewritings. We have autistic children who need us to support them as architects of their own liberation against the schools and clinicians and institutions and police and prosecutors who would crush and destroy them.

We’re going to need our anger and our public celebrations of stimming and our complicated, imperfect, messy selves for this long and hard road, because we need all of us, and all of our tactics and strategies, to keep a movement going and ultimately, to win.

Autistic Hoya — A blog by Lydia X. Z. Brown: The neurodiversity movements needs its shoes off, and fists up.

⏭ First Pillar: Mutual Aid

The story continues with, “⛑ Mutual Aid: Real Help Against the Onslaught”

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