Brand New 2022: Guidelines and Info About Us Going Into The New Year
New info and guidelines about our project!
Hey!
We are happy to greet many of you this 2022. We wish it were under better circumstances and that we could all equally go into this year with joy and hope, but part of this the purpose of this project is filling this gap where our countries and governments won’t. We’re all we got sometimes and I hope you know you have a family here that wants joy and growth for you forever and always.
We want to first thank everyone who continues to support our project and who continues to help us share, boost, and get our work out there. Without you we would not be possible. Without this level of community support we could not engage in mutual aid work the way we do. You are a part of us and keep this project going. Yeah maybe you don’t have the title of an organizer or an official member we serve, but you’re still a Spoonie Uni pal no matter what. You keep us growing. We are forever thankful for that and we hope you know how much purpose you bring us.
More than just a warm welcome and message of gratitude we wanted to create a list of more info and guidelines about us. We go by our time and crip time. We go by our capacities and limits. We are a beautiful mess, but one that manages. We have our breaks, sometimes things we didn’t plan happen (it’s like a universal disabled and chronically ill experience) and we hope everyone who engages with our work and asks of labor of us takes this into mind. We are not always in our best state or active as much as folks would like, but we can only keep our work going, and ourselves going, if we maintain some balance and don’t burnout.
New Important Info and Guidelines:
*Please read the following to get to know more about our project, what we provide, and also our limits and boundaries.*
We operate by disability justice principles and especially stick to centering the most marginalized in everything we do, from crowdfunding, to sharing, to posting on our feed for, to connecting resources to.
We organize virtually and have been since the pandemic in October 2020. We don’t plan on really changing this format for the purpose of our group, but do hope to help other groups and folks from region to region who may not always organize virtually.
We are a national project. We mainly operate within the United States but also have a member/organizer in Canada. We hope to expand more globally in the future and not solely from imperial cores.
We operate by crowdfunding. We get funds from the community solely and we do not have funds of our own to give as it is all from the community and social media promotion. We are not a business or non-profit and we don’t plan to be one anytime soon.
We have themed collective crowd-funds set for throughout the year that (for now) are our Black #DisHis Month Fund, #DisXmasFund, Juneteenth Disability Justice Fund, Indigenous Disabled People’s Fund (for Indigenous People’s Month), and one also for Disability Pride Month. These are collective crowd funds we aim to have annually for as long as we can. These are set and will always happen annually, as long as our capacities allow it.
We will individually crowdfund for folks and post things to our feed from time to time but will prioritize our current long-term members for these posts, but as we continue to grow and have more folks on board we can take on a few more folks.
We already have members we have been serving whose names, but not full names, we’ll put here briefly. Long-term members we have been serving/will continue serving are Riz, Lala, Melina, Caleb, Sunyata, Amari, Melissa and Herbert, Aida, and Imeela. Two of these folks are also main organizers. All are low-income, disabled, Black/Indigenous folks. Most are also QTGNC, agender, and non-binary as we center the most marginalized.
We want to get our folks on their feet and guarantee them more sustainability before we take on more folks long term. We no longer have a mutual aid application as it got overwhelming and we couldn’t possibly verify and actually provide for all the folks who signed up. We decided it’d be best to start slowly growing the folks we help, and also help folks short-term by sharing their posts to our social media even if we can’t help them long-term, we can still try to help their posts get out and share to encourage donations their way.
Our main organizing team consists of 4 QTGNC disabled folks, two Black Indigenous organizers, one Non-Black Vietnamese organizer, and one Non-Black Mixed Indigenous Mex/Centam organizer. We also have organizing assistants/ volunteers who help out every now and then. One is white, trans, and queer. Our other organizing assistant is non-black and Indigenous from Mexico. We are more than happy to accept more main organizers, BIPOC and NBIPOC disabled folks prioritized, and also any and all volunteers/assistants. We’ll get more into that later on in the month.
We will take breaks when we deem fit. We will usually announce these breaks, however sometimes we won’t and will just rest without warning, which should be more normalized. We don’t check DM’s constantly regardless if we are on a break or not and can only respond to so many a day. We will happily help out and respond when we have the time and see them, but we limit our DM’s and sometimes will turn them off completely for a bit if it gets too overwhelming. We aren’t a very constant message heavy group, even in our organizing chat, and that’s just what works with us!
Please respect this space! Especially white and non-black non-indigenous folks as we do not prioritize you all the time and you shouldn't expect us to. This is a boundary that’s crossed often, especially on our Twitter so please also remember your positionality.
Some New Visions and Hopes:
Something we hope to do more of is connecting our folks to other resources and resources specific to them and their region. We want to connect folks to remote job opportunities, internships, micro grants and other grants, free masks and tests, and any other aid they can get easily and quickly.
We hope to eventually create Spoonie Care Packages and send them out to folks but this proves a challenge in terms of funding, shipping, and just planning it out, but we’ll definitely keep this in on our list of imaginations that need to come to life. We want to make care packages specific to folk’s disabilities and their needs to help with symptoms.
We for sure want to grow our Patreon more. You can find more info about it here https://www.patreon.com/spoonieuni currently we are at $101 in monthly funds.
We want to add more to our Redbubble shop! We are The Spoonie Uni Project on there. We want to collaborate with more artists to create cool Disability Justice merchandise on/or off Redbubble.
By the end of 2022, we want to be at over $40k in total raised funds since our start during the pandemic in October 2020.
Creation of peer support spaces designed by our team
More collaborations with other disability justice and mutual aid groups!
These are just some ideas and imaginations we have. Many of them are possible. Many of them we hope to see manifest soon! This is just a little about us, who we are, what we do, and our guidelines and we hope this helped folks understand a little more about us.
We would also like to use this space to thanks folks who have helped out with our Black #DisHis Month fund and who have helped us raised over $3000 in funds to give to our folks. Every share and boost did so much. Every donation, no matter how big or small, also did so much. You can find out more about it on our insta which is @spoonieuniproject! We are not officially crowdfunding for the fund anymore but any and all donations that are still being sent in for it are going to Black Disabled folks most in need on our radar!
We had previous more stricter guidelines, which you’ll find the link to below, for when we had the mutual aid application and sometimes we were getting spammed and harassed through them but we no longer have that running and don’t plan to have it open again. We will simply add folks on as we see fit, and also try to build a relationship with them, one of trust and support. We see so many posts of people in need each day and hopefully can take more of these folks on as we grow more and have more ability to do so. We will reach out to folks from now on if we want to support you long-term and go from there!
Link to March 2021 guidelines: