Stimpunks is created by and for neurodivergent and disabled people. We provide mutual aid, learning opportunities, human-centered research, and living wages for our community. We presume competence, and we believe in self-determination.
We, Stimpunks
Stimpunks in a Minute
Stimpunks Foundation challenges the typical approach to helping people who are neurodivergent or disabled. We know what it is like to live with barriers and what it means to not fit in and have to forge our own community. Stimpunks knows that neurodivergent and disabled people have human needs. We offer a humane approach to help our community thrive.
Through Stimpunks Foundation, we:
- Offer financial and mutual aid;
- Hire our community members as consultants;
- Provide a learning space designed for our community; and
- Support our community’s open research efforts.
One in four U.S. adults have a disability. However, our community receives only 2% of US grant funding, and only 19% of us are employed. We can’t just let that be the truth. We have to challenge the norm and change the narrative around people who are neurodivergent or disabled.
Stimpunks Foundation seeks to do just that with our four pillars.
Our Pillars
Mutual Aid
Real help against the onslaught. Staying alive is a lot of work for a disabled person in an ableist society.
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.
Open Research
Digital sociology, neurodiversity studies, disability studies, and syncretism, in the open. Improving science by restoring the humanities.
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.
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.
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.
Our four pillars rest on the four pillars of the ADA.
- Equal Opportunity
- Independent Living
- Full Participation
- Economic Self-Sufficiency
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
Here’s a mind map of our pillars and philosophy.
Testimonials
“Stimpunks is an essential resource for educators.”
Ira Socol, co-author of Timeless Learning
“Timeless Learning” is a fundamental text of progressive pedagogy and an important part of our journey at Stimpunks. It helped us develop our notions of classroom UX, toolbelt theory, caves, campfires, and watering holes, and more.
More About Timeless Learning
When learning is allowed to be project, problem, and passion driven, then children learn because of their terroir, not disengage in spite of it. When we recognize biodiversity in our schools as healthy, then we increase the likelihood that our ecosystems will thrive.
To be contributors to educating children to live in a world that is increasingly challenging to negotiate, schools must be conceptualized as ecological communities, spaces for learning with the potential to embody all of the concepts of the ecosystem – interactivity, biodiversity, connections, adaptability, succession, and balance.
Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools
Creating paths to equity and access for all children remains the grand challenge of public education in America.
Equity provides resources so that educators can see all our children’s strengths. Access provides our children with the chance to show us who they are and what they can do. Empathy allows us to see children as children, even teens who may face all the challenges that poverty and other risk factors create. Inclusivity creates a welcoming culture of care so that no one feels outside the community.
Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools
Consider how the “habitable world” concept developed by Rosemarie Garland‐Thomson, Emory University researcher and professor, sits at the core of the philosophy of educators who developed and now sustain the structures and processes of schooling that impact young people such as Kolion (Garland‐Thomson 2017b). Garland‐Thomson views public, political, and organizational philosophy as representative of one of “two forms of world‐building, inclusive and eugenic” (Garland‐Thomson 2017a). Unfortunately, often it’s the soft educational eugenics philosophy that is most often expressed in practice, if not in words, across the nation’s schools rather than the creation of habitable worlds that are inclusive of all learners.
If we want our schools to be learning spaces that reveal the strengths of children to us, we have to create a bandwidth of opportunities that do so. That means making decisions differently, decisions driven from values that support equity, accessibility, inclusivity, empathy, cultural responsiveness, and connected relationships inside the ecosystem. Those are the words representative of habitable worlds, not words such as sort, select, remediate, suspend, or fail.
Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools
“Stimpunks is a creative, thriving community that is vital to connecting and learning. We must critically examine our classrooms to build neurodiverse-friendly spaces. Stimpunks gives us the tools to do so.”
Human Restoration Project
Neurodiversity is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. Human Restoration Project understands the importance of neurodiversity and disability in an era of mass behaviorism and unvarnished eugenics. They are true allies in the fight for the right to live and learn differently.
HRP’s vision for human-centered education is compatible with neurodiversity, the social model of disability, and human dignity. They understand that sharing power fosters self-determination, something dearly important to our community of neurodivergent and disabled people.
More About Human Restoration Project
Human Restoration Project is informing, guiding, and growing a movement toward a progressive, human-centered education system. We are bringing together a network of radical educators who are transforming classrooms across the world.
About Human Restoration Project
At Stimpunks, we choose the margin, because design is tested at the edges. HRP likewise designs for those of us at the margins. That’s because they have joined us at the edges. They show up. They listen. They integrate. They practice good allyship.
This is exemplified throughout their work, including the implementation of the Conference to Restore Humanity, a conference model for the future compatible with us Stimpunks like no other. No one else includes us like HRP.
Conference to Restore Humanity
Reframing is a big part of our advocacy. Reframing ourselves and others is hard and important work necessary to all other work.
“The long-term well-being and empowerment of Autistics and members of other neurocognitive minority groups hinges upon our ability to create a paradigm shift – a shift from the pathology paradigm to the neurodiversity paradigm.”
Dr. Nick Walker
HRP helps create this paradigm shift with their handbooks and why sheets. HRP’s materials help us reframe people as we journey through our systems.
Finding HRP was like finding an oasis. They understand, and they help.
Stimpunks is gently debugging society.
AJ Wool
The charity protects, helps and comforts individuals, while pointing out library-level flaws in some of the concepts that end up harming those individuals.
This help is profoundly wonderful, morally and functionally coherent to great need, and as true as a pure circle in its cause-and-effect form.
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
Liana McCreacare about me, read what @stimpunks is saying.
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
Stimpunks has put the fingernail into the orange-peel of the rigid world. It leaves a crescent 🌙 that others can use to help peel away those dangerous layers of as-of-yet-unmade change.
AJ Wool
Our Umbrella: Are You a Stimpunk?
Disability and neurodivergence are broad umbrellas that include many people, possibly you. The neurodivergent umbrella includes a diversity of inherent and acquired differences and spiky profiles. Many neurodivergent people don’t know they are neurodivergent. With our website and outreach, we help people get in touch with their neurodivergent and disabled identities. We respect and encourage self-diagnosis and community diagnosis. #SelfDxIsValid, and our website can help you understand your ways of being.
If you are wondering whether you are Autistic, spend time amongst Autistic people, online and offline. If you notice you relate to these people much better than to others, if they make you feel safe, and if they understand you, you have arrived.
A communal definition of Autistic ways of being
Requiring diagnosis was counter to trans liberation and acceptance. The exact same is true of Autism.
Dr. Devon Price
Self diagnosis is not just “valid” — it is liberatory. When we define our community ourselves and wrest our right to self-definition back from the systems that painted us as abnormal and sick, we are powerful, and free.
Dr. Devon Price
Though our direct aid focuses on neurodivergent and disabled people, anyone can be a Stimpunk. All neurotypes welcome. All abilities welcome. All bodyminds welcome. Allies welcome!
More About the Neurodivergent Umbrella (non-exhaustive)
Friendly reminder that neurodivergent is an umbrella term that is inclusive and not exclusive – this means mental illnesses are considered neurodivergent.
Sonny Jane Wise (@livedexperienceeducator)
A few things:
Neurodivergent is an umbrella term for anyone who has a mind or brain that diverges from what is seen as typical or normal.
Neurodivergent is a term created by Kassiane Asasumasu, a biracial, multiply neurodivergent activist. Neurodiversity is a different term created by Judy Singer, an autistic sociologist.
Neurodivergent doesn’t just refer to neurological conditions, this is an inaccurate idea based on the prefix of neuro.
Identifying as neurodivergent is up to the individual and we don’t gatekeep or enforce the term.
- ADHD
- DID & OSDD
- ASPD
- BPD
- NPD
- Dyslexia
- CPTSD
- Dyspraxia
- Sensory Processing
- Dyscalculia
- PTSD
- Dysgraphia
- Tourette’s Syndrome
- Stuttering & Cluttering
- Anxiety & Depression
- Personality Disorders/Conditions
- Bipolar
- Autism
- Epilepsy
- OCD
- ABI
- Tic Disorders
- Schizophrenia
- Misophonia
- HPD
- Down Syndrome
- Synesthesia
- Panic Disorders/Conditions
- Developmental Language Disorder/Condition
- Developmental Co-ordination Disorder/Condition
It is time to celebrate our interdependence!
The notion of disability in our society is underscored by a bizarre conception of “independence”.
The Myth of Independence: How The Social Model of Disability Exposes Society’s Double Standards » NeuroClastic
It is time to celebrate our interdependence!
Collaboration allows us to create genuinely safe spaces for autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people.
To face the challenges of the future, we’ll need the problem-solving abilities of different types of minds working together.
The Best Autism Books, recommended by Steve Silberman
Pluralism is our reality.
Do you know why we have the sunflowers? It’s not because Vincent van Gogh suffered. It’s because Vincent van Gogh had a brother who loved him. Through all the pain, he had a tether, a connection to the world. And that is the focus of the story we need. Connection.
Hannah Gadsby: Nanette
Whether neurodivergent, disabled, or an ally, being a Stimpunk means reframing.
We center the edges in service to all bodyminds.
Join us!
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
We Reframe
Challenge the norm and change the narrative by reframing.
Reframe these states of being that have been labelled deficiencies or pathologies as human differences.
Normal Sucks: Author Jonathan Mooney on How Schools Fail Kids with Learning Differences
Content note: Our website includes music, lyrics, writing, and art that address ableism, eugenics, exclusion, mental health, depression, dysphoria, behaviorism, abuse, chronic pain, and death. There are a few swear words in quoted materials.
Also included is an outpouring of neurodivergent and disabled perspective, culture, and joy.
My kids have been kicked out of many, many places for being different—just like I was.
Catapult | The World Doesn’t Bend for Disabled Kids (or Disabled Parents)
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.
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.
We’re going to rewrite the narratives.
Not having the vocabulary to understand yourself and your loved ones is a tragedy. Our story of reframing continues via the “Continue” button at the bottom of each page in the journey.
Next on our journey: “Reframe Disability and Difference: We’re Going to Rewrite the Narratives“
