Notice: Grant requests are temporarily paused as we serve those already in our pipeline. Grants will re-open on June 1st 2024.
Staying alive is a lot of work for a disabled person in an ableist society…
DISABILITY VISIBILITY: FIRST PERSON STORIES FROM THE 21ST CENTURY
Each month, we issue 4 mutual aid grants of US$500 each to fellow neurodivergent and disabled people. These grants cover anything you need for your welfare and survival.
Please use the form below to initiate your aid request. All of your information is private and is used solely for evaluating the request and our internal compliance processes. It will not be marketed or sold.
Unfortunately, we cannot provide requests to minors without guardian approval. We are also limited to US residents only.
How Do Grants Work?
The way our mutual aid works is we do it once a month, about one week before the end of the month, we have a board meeting and select the grantees for that month. Then, we will send out an email letting you know if you have been selected or not.
You can receive up to (but not guaranteed) 3 grants per year. Each grant is US$500. Your lifetime mutual aid cap is $1,500. We have a large number of mutual aid requests coming in, and we want to meet the need of each grantee. If you are not selected for a certain month, your application will automatically roll over to the next month until the end of the year (12/31/2024).
NOTICE: Starting on January 1, 2025 you will need to resubmit any previous applications from 2024. We restart the pipeline at the beginning of the year each year.
If you are selected, we will need to verify your identity before sending the funds. This can be done in a quick video where you just hold a photo I.D. up and we verify it is you. If video verification is not an option, you can text or email a selfie holding up your I.D. (this information will only be used for the purpose of verifying your identity). If you have a deadname, we can work with that.
We consider requests on a monthly basis. We will always get back to you on the status of your request. We would like to approve all requests and offer larger, more impactful grants, and as our donor and funding outreach grows, we hope to reach that goal.
On Grants and Taxes
We do not issue form 1099 for grants. In most cases, grants are not taxed as part of your income. Please consult an accountant to be sure.
Here are some relevant articles:
In general, amounts granted to an individual solely out of the payor’s “detached and disinterested generosity” are treated as “gifts” that are excluded from tax under section 102 of the Internal Revenue Code. The IRS has confirmed that a payment made by a charity to an individual that responds to the individual’s needs (in order words, is motivated by charitable intent rather than any moral or legal duty) qualifies for this exclusion, and consequently is not subject to Form 1099 reporting. See Revenue Ruling 2003-12.
Must a Form 1099 be issued for a need-based grant made to an individual? – Q&A #81 — Sustainability Education 4 Nonprofits
When it comes to nonprofit taxes, because these funds are considered charitable grants and not designated as payment for services and/or compensation, organizations don’t need to issue 1099s for disbursed grant funds.
Can Nonprofit Grants Be Taxed? | Instrumentl
Grants to Individuals | Internal Revenue Service
- The grant is awarded on an objective and nondiscriminatory basis under a procedure approved in advance by the Service, and
- It is shown to the satisfaction of the Service that one of the following requirements is met–a. The grant is a scholarship or fellowship and is to be used for study at an educational institution that normally maintains a regular faculty and curriculum and normally has a regularly organized body of students in attendance at the place where the educational activities are carried on. For these purposes, grant recipients need not be limited to degree candidates, nor must the grant be limited to tuition, fees, and course-required books, supplies and equipment. A recipient may use grant funds for room, board, travel, research, clerical help or equipment, that are incidental to the purposes of the scholarship or fellowship grant.b. The grant qualifies as a prize or award that is excludible from gross income under Internal Revenue Code section 74(b), if the recipient is selected from the general public. For this purpose, the recipient may keep the prize or award, and need not authorize the foundation to transfer the prize or award to a governmental unit or to another charity.c. The grant’s purpose is to achieve a specific objective, produce a report or similar product, or improve or enhance a literary, artistic, musical, scientific, teaching, or similar capacity, skill or talent of the grantee.
What Do Grants Cover?
Our mutual aid grants are very flexible. They cover anything you need to live, work, play, and survive. They can assist your welfare and survival however you need.
Here are some examples of things we commonly cover:
- Rent and housing
- Credit card bills
- Clothing and personal hygiene items
- Medication
- Medical supplies
- Medical bills
- Education costs or debt
- Food
This is a non-exhaustive list. We have yet to encounter a situation our grants couldn’t cover.
BTW, we also offer “creator grants” to help fund your art, advocacy, or research. These are US$3,000 grants offered to neurodivergent and disabled creators. You can apply for both a creator grant and a mutual aid grant.
Do I Need a Diagnosis?
You do not need to be formally diagnosed as neurodivergent or disabled to qualify for our grants. We respect and encourage self-identification. When filling out the grant request form, you do not need to provide proof of diagnosis.
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
You can pursue formal diagnosis if you want, for legal protection and educational access. It will never be what makes you Autistic. If you’re uncertain whether you are, meet more of us and join in community with us. We need each other far more than we need psychiatric approval.
For more on our philosophy regarding diagnosis and self-identification, visit our Diagnosis glossary page.
Self-identification offers advantages in that it could constitute a key step towards autistic (and also more generally neurodivergent) liberation, by transferring power into the hands of autistic people themselves
What’s in a name? The costs and benefits of a formal autism diagnosis – Sue Fletcher-Watson, 2023
Anxious?
Anxious? We’re neurodivergent and disabled and have huge form anxiety from filling out forms to prove, over and over, our disability and neurodivergence. Don’t worry about getting it wrong. Tell your story how you can.
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
Burned Out?
Burned out? Burnout is a common theme in requests we receive. Some of us at Stimpunks have experienced career-ending burnout. We’d like to buy you some time to recover.
Here’s a passage from our burnout page from Ryan, talking about his episodes of burnout.
I’ve experienced several moments of burnout in my life and career. Being something that I neurologically am not is exhausting. Wearing the mask of neurotypicality drains my batteries and melts my spoons. For a long time, for decades, I didn’t fully understand what was going on with me. I didn’t understand the root causes of my cycles of burnout. Finding the Actually Autistic community online woke me to the concept of autistic burnout. When I found the community writing excerpted below, I finally understood an important part of myself. Looking back on my life, I recognized those periods when coping mechanisms had stopped working and crumbled. I recognized my phases and changes as continuous fluid adaptation.
🔥 Autistic Burnout: The Cost of Masking and Passing – Stimpunks Foundation
Privacy Notice
We realize this is sensitive information you are sharing with us.
- We will keep it private.
- We won’t share this information with anyone.
- The only people with access to this information are the Directors of Stimpunks.
- We will delete this information upon request.
- Here is our privacy policy.
- Be warned that our system collects IP addresses for all form submissions.
- An IP address can be used to approximate your location on earth, including city and sometimes street.
- There is no way to turn this off.
- If you are concerned with us having your IP address, use a VPN.
Please read the data collection and privacy disclosure below the form before submitting your information. We disclose where your information is stored and what we do to keep it safe.
Ethical Principles and Code of Conduct
At Stimpunks, we have sensitive conversations about trauma and mental health with our clients. We hold ourselves to the ethical principles and code of conduct of psychologists.
https://www.apa.org/ethics/code
Talking about clients to other clients, for example, is not okay.
When someone tells you the intimate details of their life, and you go and tell a bunch of strangers about it, you have done something wrong. It is perhaps only because this practice is so entrenched that we tend to forget this.
Mental Health and the Invasion of Privacy | Psychology Today
The Form
Our form to request aid has four parts:
- First, we ask for contact information.
- Then we ask for your social media. This is optional but helpful in us getting to know each other.
- Then we ask you to describe your need and tell your story however you can.
- Finally, we show you a preview of your submission so you can review and revise before you submit.
Notice: Grant requests are temporarily paused as we serve those already in our pipeline. Grants will re-open on June 1st 2024.
What Information Do We Collect?
🔐 About Us and What We Do With Your Information
Chelsea, Inna, and Ryan are at the other end of our contact form. Get to know us on our About page. Alas, we can’t usually move at the speed of emergencies, and sometimes we take a week or two off for self-care. We get lots of spam and sometimes miss your requests in the noise. If you don’t hear from us within a week, feel free to contact us again.
About your information:
- We keep your data private and share your data only with third parties that make our services possible. Read our full Privacy Policy.
- If you submitted a form to us, your information will be entered into our forms software (WPForms and WordPress).
- A subset of that information will go to our CRM software (HubSpot).
- A subset of that will go to our accounting software (QuickBooks Online) if you receive money from us.
- This data retention is solely for legal compliance purposes. We will not sell or give your data to third parties. We will not use your information to market anything to you.
- Your IP address will be used to geolocate your browsing session. Our software does not allow turning off IP address collection.
- If you are concerned with us having your IP address, use a VPN.
- If you apply for a grant and your IP address is outside the United States, we will ask you to confirm you are in the United States. We’ll take your word for it and never ask you to unmask your IP.
- We collect as little as we can from you and do our best to keep it secure.
- We use 1Password for Business to secure our accounts with long, randomly generated, unique passwords.
- Your information will be reviewed by our directors: Ryan, Inna, Chelsea, and Norah.
- Periodically, nonprofit lawyers and consultants will have access to some information in order to audit our processes for ethics and legality.
- We delete your form submission and any documents you attach after determining whether to send you a grant or not. We consider personal information a toxic asset and don’t want to keep more of your data than we have to.
- We will also delete your information from our systems upon request.
- However, if you get a grant from us we do have to retain contact information about who we gave to and the amount given. We retain this contact information for 3 years as required by the Internal Revenue Service.
Nap Director and Self-care Expert
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