Volunteer

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We exist as friction.

Changing the Disability Design Narrative – UX CakE

We exist as friction, and it’s exhausting. Allies, load-share our burden of existing as friction against structural ableism. “Staying alive is a lot of work for a disabled person in an ableist society.” Share some of that work and friction. We need respite from this wildly painful work. We need help against the onslaught.

yellow blue red pink purple green multicolored open umbrellas hanging on strings under blue sky

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
Table of Contents

Help

Some ways you can help in your everyday life:

  • Reframe yourself and others. This is hard and important work necessary to all other work. Change the narrative. Start reframing here.
  • Advocate for accessibility at school, work, and in your community.
  • Be a threat to inequity in your spheres of influence.
  • Combat the myths.
  • Use and promote Identity First Language.
  • Elevate care as infrastructure. Stimpunks exists because our systems effectively don’t.
  • Celebrate our interdependence!

Want to volunteer with us? Volunteers are the lifeblood of nonprofit foundations.

If you are in the Austin, Texas area, we need help with care work, running our learning center, and putting on accessible events for our community, including punk shows.

If you are anywhere, distributed learning and collaboration is a big component of what we do. We’re always working on our website and our outreach and our operations. Help us use technology to run this thing. Help us tell our stories with an authentic, candid, and vulnerable outpouring of words, science, and art. Help us find our people and co-create ecologies of care. Help us fundraise so we can keep our community going.

Here are some things we need help with:

  • Write alt text for images on our website.
  • Gather research for our website.
  • Write pages for our website.
  • Design for scrollytelling and conceptual web portmanteau on our website.
  • Create plain language and easy read versions of our web pages.
  • Translate pages on our website.
  • Create art for our website.
  • Flow patrol our website and systems.
  • Design print materials.
  • Do research and data entry for the various databases we maintain such as aligned organizations and their service offerings.
  • Fundraise.
  • Create pitch decks.
  • Find grants and write grant applications.
  • Write white papers.
  • Create workshops.
  • Create courses.
  • Create learning space programming.
  • Mentor people in our community on your areas of expertise.
  • Support events on-site (Austin, TX, USA).
  • Support our learning center on-site (Austin, TX, USA).

The notion of disability in our society is underscored by a bizarre conception of “independence”.

It is time to celebrate our interdependence!

Collaboration allows us to create genuinely safe spaces for autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people.

The Myth of Independence: How The Social Model of Disability Exposes Society’s Double Standards » NeuroClastic

For the first time, the age of digital networks enables us to construct cognitive assistants that help us to nurture and maintain globally distributed human scale competency networks – networks of mutual trust. It is time to tap into this potential and to combine it with the potential of zero-marginal cost global communication and collaboration.

All healthy and resilient institutions have a well-functioning competency network (Laloux 2014; Wilson 2015). A good way to understand competency networks is via the notion of trustworthiness and the nurturing and maintenance of trusted relationships (Bettin and Elliffe 2016). A competency network can be formalised as a directed graph of experience-based pair-wise trustworthiness ratings in relation to various domains between the members of a group. You can think of it as the gifts that people bring to life by relating to each other.

The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations

Values Fit

Before volunteering, get to know us and our mission, creed, covenant, and philosophy.

Do our values fit yours?

We don’t hire based on culture or select candidates because we’d like to have a drink with them. We hire and reward team members based on our shared values as detailed on this page. We want a values fit, not a culture fit. We want cultural diversity instead of cultural conformity, such as a brogrammer atmosphere. Said differently: “culture add” > “culture fit” or “hire for culture contribution” since our mission is that everyone can contribute.

GitLab Values | GitLab

Our values are expressed all over our website, but in particular on our “organize our lives around love and care” pages.

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.

A disembodied arm with blue skin and a self-care tattoo flashes the sign of the horns

Covenant

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

Two human side silhouette positioned Face to face overlaid with various semi-transparent line connected circular (network node) shapes.

Philosophy

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

Rainbow woven cloth evoking our diversity and interdependence

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.

The many forms of difference. Adaptive Behavior Assessment (ABAS-3), Adult ADHD Self-report Scale (ASRS-v1.1), and Behavior Rating Inventory Executive Function (BRIEF 2) forms spread across a wooden table

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.

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

Contributor Covenant

All Stimpunks agree to abide by our contributor covenant while in Stimpunks space.

Do you agree with our covenant and code of conduct?

“Everything is politics”, but the code of conduct is not about an advance of progressive/left-wing politics. It’s about establishing a minimal level of civil and professional collaboration. Civil, non-discriminatory, and professional behavior should be a baseline and shared value held by people of all ideologies, regardless of political affiliation (with the obvious exception of hate groups).

Contributor Covenant: Frequently Asked Questions about Contributor Covenant

Roles in Social Change

In our lives and as part of organizations, workplaces and movements, many of us play different roles in pursuit of equity, shared liberation, inclusion, and justice. And yet, we often get overwhelmed, lost, and burned out. Some of us are newcomers to ongoing social change efforts and don’t know where to start. Still others are catalyzed into action in the midst of a crisis in our community.

The Social Change Ecosystem Map is a framework that can help individuals, networks, and organizations align with social change values, individual roles, and the broader ecosystem.

The Social Change Ecosystem Map (2020)

While considering volunteering, consider your roles in social change.

  • Weavers: I see the through-lines of connectivity between people, places, organizations, ideas, and movements.
  • Experimenters: I innovate, pioneer, and invent. I take risks and course-correct as needed.
  • Frontline Responders: I address community crises by marshaling and organizing resources, networks, and messages.
  • Visionaries: I imagine and generate our boldest possibilities, hopes and dreams, and remind us of our direction.
  • Builders: I develop, organize, and implement ideas, practices, people, and resources in service of a collective vision.
  • Caregivers: I nurture and nourish the people around me by creating and sustaining a community of care, joy, and connection.
  • Disruptors: I take uncomfortable and risky actions to shake up the status quo, to raise awareness, and to build power.
  • Healers: I recognize and tend to the generational and current traumas caused by oppressive systems, institutions, policies, and practices.
  • Storytellers: I craft and share our community stories, cultures, experiences, histories, and possibilities through art, music, media, and movement.
  • Guides: I teach, counsel, and advise, using my gifts of well-earned discernment and wisdom.
The Social Change Ecosystem Map (2020)

Playbooks at Stimpunks

There are lots of ways to help out. We offer these four playbooks that we borrowed from Human Restoration Project as convenient shorthand.

Happy face emoji with flapping hands

Joymakers

Joymakers assist in design, artwork, music creation, and other creative endeavors.

Hands overlapping with a heart painted in the middle

Empaths

Empaths assist in partnerships, event hosting, and social media campaigns.

Envoys

Envoys assist in reaching out to schools, fundraising, and informing our work.

Operators

Operator assist in transcription/translation, copy-editing, data entry, and more.

Volunteer

If all that feels like a values fit, here’s our volunteer form.

Our volunteer form has four parts:

  1. First, we ask for contact information.
  2. Then we ask for your social media. This is optional but helpful in us getting to know each other.
  3. Then we ask you to describe your interests and how you can help our mission.
  4. Finally, we show you a preview of your submission so you can review and revise before you submit.
Step 1 of 4

🔐 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. Your information will be entered into our CRM software (HubSpot) and our accounting software (QuickBooks Online) for compliance purposes. Your IP address will be used to geolocate your browsing session. Your “user journey” through our website on the way to submitting the form will be captured. 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, and Chelsea. Our nonprofit consultant and our nonprofit lawyer audit our grants and grant process for ethics and legality.

Middle-aged white man with dark glasses and trimmed brown beard smiles at the camera
Ryan
Bearmouse in Power Wheelchair
Inna
Inna
Chelsea
Chelsea’s badass jellyfish tattoo

Nap Director and Self-care Expert

Doan Lotion Potion

A yawning black and white cat laying on a stone patio
Doan Lotion Potion Yawns Mightily

Everyone can contribute.