Grant Application Questions and Answers

Here are our answers to the questions on a grant we recently applied for.

Table of Contents

• History
• Root Causes
• Action & Lasting Effect
• Constituent-Led
• Community-Wide
• Organizational Structure and Decision Making
• Movement Building
• Funding and Community Support
• Community Feedback
• 3-5 Milestones

History

When did your group come together and why? Share major accomplishments and tell us about your recent activities, successes, and learning opportunities.

Stimpunks was created to forge the way for educational inclusion and to give our community the means to survive and to thrive. We as a disabled and neurodivergent run organization had to roll our own education, because even the “all means all” of public education failed to include us. We had to create our own care systems, because “we realized that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us.” “Responsibility for the survival of entire communities lies with us.”

Learn more about our history, our successes, and our current activities on our front page and our Now page. We put a lot of time into long-form scrollytelling (scrolling + storytelling) and will be sharing links to our website as part of this application process. You’ve never seen a website like ours. Check it out. Professors have told us they use our website to teach digital composition.

https://stimpunks.org/now/

Root Causes

What is the specific problem or injustice your group is trying to solve? What are the root causes of the problem (racism, poverty, sexism, etc.)?

We live in an age of mass behaviorism, rampant ableism, and unvarnished eugenics.

https://stimpunks.org/glossary/ableism/

https://stimpunks.org/glossary/behaviorism/

https://stimpunks.org/glossary/eugenics/

Schools are inaccessible to us because of “empty pedagogy, behaviorism, and the rejection of equity“.

https://stimpunks.org/glossary/equity/

When you or your kid is diagnosed as neurodivergent, almost all of the professional advice you get from education and healthcare is steeped in deficit ideology and the pathology paradigm.

https://stimpunks.org/glossary/deficit-ideology/

https://stimpunks.org/glossary/pathology-paradigm/

The logistics of disability and difference in a structurally ableist and inaccessible world poisoned by bad framing are exhausting, often impossible. We are perpetual hackers, mappers, and testers of our systems by necessity of survival.

https://stimpunks.org/access/

“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

Part of surviving the onslaught is naming the systems of power.

https://stimpunks.org/pathways/systems-of-power/

Action & Lasting Effect

What is your overall strategy for solving the injustice described above? What social, economic, political, or cultural institutions or systems will you work to change in order to fight the injustice? What actions will come out of your work? What will be different in your community and our society because of your work?

IF you do direct services to meet the needs of your community, how do you connect that work to organizing, action & systems change?

IF you are creating an alternative to a current system/policy/institution, please tell us why and describe how that will make real change for your community.

We tackle injustice through two avenues, education and direct giving to individuals.

Our mutual aid grants and creator grants give money directly to individuals to use as they need.

https://stimpunks.org/philosophy/direct-support-to-individuals/

We develop educational programming directed at these institutions:

• Public and private education
• Human services
• Psychiatry
• Academia and autism research
• And more.

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

https://stimpunks.org/research/activist/

In addition to educating those in existing systems and institutions, we have created our own anti-ableist learning spaces compatible with neurodiversity and disability. These spaces use the best of progressive pedagogy to avoid the problems that exclude us from public and private education.

https://stimpunks.org/space/

Constituent-Led

Who is most impacted by the injustice you are fighting? How are those most affected actively providing leadership and direction for your work? How do you identify & develop new leaders?

Neurodivergent and disabled people are most impacted by the ableism we fight.

As part of our mission, we hire neurodivergent and disabled people and invest in their professional development. We don’t think of administrative costs as “overhead”, though we are mindful of how much we spend. We consider administrative costs a component of our mission. We pay living wages to those who help us run the organization. We include folks in our software subscriptions so that they have the tools to do work. We introduce folks to the rhythms of distributed work and team work so that they can take these skills with them wherever they go.

Community-Wide

How does your organization define diversity within your constituency? How do you ensure that everyone is represented in your organization – especially those with less privilege in your community? In addition to filling out the diversity chart, describe any activities, education, or actions your organization has taken in this area. Also explain any progress or set-backs in this area.

We outline our notions of diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging as well as the major obstacles to them on this page:

https://stimpunks.org/2025/01/30/deib-and-their-adversaries/

Organizational Structure and Decision Making

Who decides what kind of work your group does? What is the decision-making process? How are you organized (staff, board, volunteers, leaders)? How are your decisionmakers accountable to the larger community? If you have a fiscal agent, please explain the relationship.

We reject hierarchy. We use prosocial principles, restorative practices, transformative justice, and an advice process. We encourage omnidirectional learning, competency networks, and a “Default to open” philosophy. We use the NeurodiVenture operating modeled.

https://stimpunks.org/glossary/advice-process/

https://stimpunks.org/glossary/prosocial/

https://stimpunks.org/glossary/restorative-practices/

https://stimpunks.org/glossary/transformative-justice/

https://stimpunks.org/glossary/niche-construction/

https://stimpunks.org/glossary/competency-network/

https://stimpunks.org/glossary/omni-directional-learning/

https://stimpunks.org/philosophy/default-to-open/

https://stimpunks.org/glossary/neurodiventure/

Movement Building

How does your group see itself as part of a larger movement for social change? How does your work connect with other social change issues and communities? Describe the most important coalitions, collaborations or networks that you participate in. Include your organization’s role.

We actively participate in the greater neurodiversity and disability rights movements and are part of the ever expanding Autistic rhizome.

https://stimpunks.org/glossary/autistic-rhizome/

Our allies include:

https://stimpunks.org/allies/

Funding and Community Support

Please describe your current fundraising activities. How does your community support your organization? How do you plan to sustain your future work? If you have any committed or pending grants, please list them, if applicable.

We do fundraising through our website and peer-to-peer campaigns as well as events.

Our community helps with peer-to-peer fundraising.

We plan to sustain our future work by continuing peer-to-peer fundraising and applying for grants with the help of our partners at Point B(e) Strategies.

Community Feedback

How do you integrate community feedback into your work?

We default to open. We run our organization in the open in our community Discord and on our website. We iterate openly, create feedback loops, and continuously integrate that feedback using methods we developed in open source project management.

https://stimpunks.org/philosophy/default-to-open/

https://stimpunks.org/glossary/feedback-loop/

https://stimpunks.org/glossary/iteration/

https://stimpunks.org/fieldguide/communication/

3-5 Milestones

List 3-5 milestones your organization aims to achieve with this grant over the coming year. Please include detailed plans on how you intend to reach each milestone. For example: “By July 2025, we intend to specific milestone, and we plan to achieve this by detailed action 1 and detailed action 2, etc.

Our Objectives and Key Results are listed on our Now page.

https://stimpunks.org/now/