on the street · under the umbrellas · raining on the roof · come in out of it
A shopfront on the street, roofed with umbrellas
Community Care
Mutual aid, peer support and any other help, asked for and offered among people who get it.
This is the room where you ask. Its channel on the CB is for asking for mutual aid, for peer support and for any other help you need, and for offering it to whoever asks. Nobody here is a professional, and nobody needs to be: everybody under these umbrellas is a peer, which means somebody who has been somewhere like where you are.
To ask, sign on to the CB and tune the radio to This room while you are in here, or open Community Care on the chat page, under Community. If you are not on the CB yet, the Community Center says how to get an invite.
This channel is people, and it is not a crisis line. If tonight is worse than a hard day, our Help page is a set of doors, and Coping lists crisis lines and warmlines.
Ask, offer, receive, decline
It’s much easier to practice asking, offering, receiving, and declining among people who “get it”!
That is the whole of what the channel is for, and all four of them are allowed here. The line is off a slide in Vivian Ly’s talk at Autscape 2020, which our own Community Care page carries, and which is here to press as well.
On Autscape’s own channel. The questions at the end were left out of the upload, as its own description says. Nothing reaches YouTube until you press it.
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Asking
Say what you need, in your own words, as much or as little as you like. Nobody asks you to prove it, to say how you came to need it, or to have tried everything else first. Asking is not a weight on the room: it is how the people who want to show up find out where to stand.
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Offering
Offer what you can spare, when you can spare it, and on your own terms. Nobody keeps track of who offered and who did not, and an offer that turns out to be more than you have can be taken back.
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Receiving
Take what is offered without paying for it in gratitude. Thanks are welcome and never owed, and nobody keeps a note of who has had help, or how often.
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Declining
Either side can say no. An offer that does not fit can be turned down, an ask can go by, and nobody is asked for a reason. A no is an answer, not a verdict on anybody.
Solidarity, not charity
“Solidarity, not charity.”
Mutual aid is people meeting each other’s needs directly, sideways rather than downwards. Nobody in here is the giving kind or the needing kind, because most of us are both, often in the same week, and the umbrella you are standing under today is not the one you brought.
It’s about moving from a rights-based frame to a justice-based one: not accommodation as charity, but care as infrastructure. Not self-improvement, but survival as a shared project.
Stimpunks also makes mutual aid grants and creator grants to neurodivergent and disabled people. Those are the Foundation’s, by application, in scheduled rounds, and they cannot cover anything urgent; their own pages say whether they are open, who they can reach and what they cannot pay for. Asking in this channel is asking the community, not applying, and you can do both.
Peer support, and where it comes from
Peer support is typically defined as a non-clinical, mutuality-based relationship between folks who share lived experience
The roots of peer support come from self-advocacy and activist movements that have always been rooted in resistance, mutual aid, and liberatory politics
Tuesday Ferguson wrote that for our blog in 2024, as a youth peer support worker, about what becomes of peer support when it turns into a job inside the systems it grew up resisting. The whole essay is better than anything this room could say about it. What the room takes from it is where peer support comes from:
It was championed first by the people who built kinship over the fact that they’d been othered, not by nonprofits and politicians playing the respectability game
I believe people first and foremost do mutual aid and peer support because that’s what it means to show up for each other in relationships
So nobody here is assessed, referred or signed up for anything. Peer support in a channel is somebody saying that happened to me too, and this is what helped, and staying. Nothing has to come of it that anybody else can measure:
provide care and support, without imposing interaction or forcing others to perform to a specific measurable outcome
Our glossary’s entry on peer support starts by naming the version this is not:
Many schools have run peer support models in the past where neurodivergent young people have been ‘buddied up’ with a neurotypical peer. However, often the goal of this is to help the neurodivergent person ‘learn’ neurotypical ‘social norms’.
Nobody in here is buddied up with anybody to learn how to pass. The research the entry gathers says what Autistic people kept asking for instead, and it is honest about what being a peer does not give you:
A common thread in the experiences of older autistic adults (aged 50+) was the importance of universality; being ‘in the same boat’.
The preference was for autistic-led peer support. However, individuals acknowledged that being autistic does not inherently provide the knowledge or skills necessary for the role, and that this requires training and/or experience.
This room keeps that second line. Being a peer is not the same as knowing what to do, nobody in here is pretending to be a service, and the entry says what peer support is for beside the rest:
Autistic adults desired peer support not as a substitute for specialist services such as mental health support, but working alongside them.
Everybody’s umbrella
I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community.
We gotta keep each other alive any way we can ’cause nobody else is goin’ do it.
Our Community Care page opens with those two, and then with the story the dominant culture tells about care: that needing help is weakness, that independence is a virtue, and that your survival is your own problem.
Community care is the refusal of that story.
I am fighting for an interdependence that embraces need and tells the truth: no one does it on their own and the myth of independence is just that, a myth.
Self-care is birthed by and through community care.
The parts we need to survive are scattered All amongst us.
That is what the umbrellas are. Nobody brought enough for everybody, and nobody had to. Every umbrella is tied to the ones beside it and to the shopfronts either side, nothing else holds the roof up, and not one of them keeps anybody dry by itself. The ties are drawn from a line of Sophie K. Rosa’s, which our page carries too:
Our mutual entwinement must be careful, spacious and supple, with no single knot tied too tight.
What is not under here
- No proving it. Nobody asks for a diagnosis, a story, a reason or evidence, and nobody decides whether a need is real.
- No sorting. Nobody here is the deserving kind or the other kind. Everybody under the umbrellas is somebody who might ask.
- No ledger. Help puts nobody in anybody’s debt. Nothing records who gave and who got, and receiving costs nobody a performance of gratitude.
- Nothing counted. No total of what was asked or what was given, no list of who helped, and no wall of thank-yous.
- Nobody at the front. No professionals, no caseworkers, no intake and no forms. The only expertise in the room is having been there.
- Nobody owes an answer. An ask can go unanswered and an offer can go untaken, and neither is a verdict on anybody. If an ask goes by, asking again is allowed.
- Not a crisis line. Our Help page is a set of doors, and Coping lists crisis lines and warmlines. Nobody here is on call.
Who reads the channel, and for how long
- Everybody signed on to the CB can read this room’s channel, so say only what you would say in a room with all of them in it. It keeps the house norms, like every channel.
- Every message on it goes 48 hours after it was sent, like every channel on the CB. For an ask that needs longer, Mutual aid in the forums keeps a topic 3 months after its last post, and Coping keeps one 1 week.
- A direct message is between two people, and it is not end-to-end encrypted. One that breaks the house norms can be reported, which is the one way it reaches a moderator.
Next door, and down the street
Other rooms on this street that keep somebody going, each in its own way:
- Dead Tired Society, peer support by and for the burnt out, in a borrowed room with the big lights off, where nobody has to talk.
- Hey, Good Cookin’, a community kitchen where nobody is turned away and nothing is asked of you, not even a reason.
- Nothing For Sale, a free market in a lay-by out past the last streetlight: take what you need, leave what you can.
- The Healing Checkpoint, room 429, with a bed nobody is charging you for and nobody at the desk asking what you are there for.
- The Community Center, where you get started on the CB, and the house norms every channel keeps.
Whose this is
- The umbrellas are our Community Care page’s. Its sign is an umbrella, and its photograph is open umbrellas in every colour hanging on strings over a street. The drawing is ours, made as code by Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, to Ryan’s brief, and nothing on this page calls an AI while you read it.
- Every quotation belongs to whoever said it and is credited to them where it stands: Vivian Ly, bell hooks, Larry Mitchell, Mia Mingus, Talila A. Lewis, Tinu Abayomi-Paul, Sophie K. Rosa, Tuesday Ferguson, Salvesen Mindroom Research Centre and Norris, Harvey and Hull. The words around them are ours, written for this room.
- Tapping the Radical Roots of Peer Support is Tuesday Ferguson’s, published on our blog in 2024 under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Vivian Ly’s talk is Autscape’s, from Autscape 2020, on their own channel; the presenter is named in the video’s own description.
- Every quotation in this room is 40 words or fewer and was read on one of our own pages, Community Care, Peer Support, Tapping the Radical Roots of Peer Support, on 2026-10-22.
tools/make-community-care.pychecks each one against those pages word for word whenever our copy of stimpunks.org is on the machine, and where our page names no work for a line, neither does this room. - The type is Agbalumo, by Raphael Alẹ́gbẹ́lẹ́yẹ̀, Sorkin Type, Eben Sorkin, for the room’s name and its headings, and Ysabeau Infant, by Christian Thalmann, for everything you read. Both under the SIL Open Font License, read off their own records. More in the liner notes.
Job marker — a spare umbrella, rolled up and left on the dry paving by the door
You have found a job marker. The Adventurer’s Guild is a shopfront on the street, and it posts jobs that send you round these rooms. Take the code below to its board and that job is done. Nothing here is scored, nothing expires, and one is a perfectly good number of jobs to do.
The job: The fourth thing
Before the code: Community Care’s channel is for asking, offering, receiving, and one thing more. What is it?
Hint 1
It is on the last of the four cards.
Hint 2
It means saying no.
Last hint
Declining.
Give me the answer
The answer is Declining. Asking, offering, receiving and declining are the four things the channel is for, and all four are allowed. Either side can say no, and a no is an answer, not a verdict on anybody.
Taking the answer is a real way through this, not a lesser one. Nothing is watching and nothing is written down.
Quest code: SPARE
That is the one.
Asking, offering, receiving and declining are the four things the channel is for, and all four are allowed. Either side can say no, and a no is an answer, not a verdict on anybody.
Quest code: SPARE
HOW LOUD DO YOU WANT IT?
Starts wherever your device says. Nothing moves, flashes, or plays until you say so — and at MAX GLITTER the rain falls on the roof, and never under it.