About the press
Advocates are always expected to explain themselves. The status quo is never asked to. That asymmetry is a form of power, and it wears families down.
Families navigating schools, hospitals and systems are constantly asked to justify what should be obvious. Why does my child need that support? Why is this not working? Why are you doing it that way? The answers exist — in research, in law, in lived experience — but finding them, organising them, and presenting them concisely in a meeting is exhausting work, and it lands on the people with the least left over.
Why Sheets do that work in advance. This press does the rest of it: the printing, the pagination, the cover page, the folder. That is the part that eats an evening at eleven o'clock the night before a meeting.
Where the form comes from
The Why Sheet is not our invention. It is Alfie Kohn's, and he described it exactly:
I imagined a set of handouts, each consisting of a single (double-sided) sheet that responded to a common question. The idea was to lay out the case briskly, making liberal use of bullet points and offering a short bibliography at the end for anyone who wanted more information.
In short, any practice that's constructive yet still controversial would be fair game for one of these punchy handouts.
Why concision is the whole problem
Noam Chomsky's word for it is concision: ideas that align with power need no explanation, and ideas that do not need a great deal.
If you want to repeat the religion you can get away with it between two commercials. If you wanna say something that questions the religion, you're expected to give evidence, and that you can't do between two commercials, so therefore you lack concision so therefore you can't talk.
We have to define all our terms. Thinking differently often means speaking differently, so we end up sounding like we are from somewhere else. A Why Sheet is what a good balance of concision and explanation looks like when you are the one being asked to explain.
Sheets and broadsides
A Why Sheet is the argument, at whatever length the argument needs. A broadside is one physical sheet, printed both sides, that compresses an argument already made at length and points back at it. A broadside invents no claim its parent does not carry. If you cannot finish the sentence "someone picks this up when…", what you have is a summary, and a summary belongs on the page it summarises.
The licence, plainly
Every sheet is CC0 1.0. Print it. Change it. Delete the parts that do not apply to you. Put your own name on it. Hand it to a hundred people. You do not need permission and you do not need to credit us.
Two things sit outside that. Quoted material belongs to whoever wrote it — the sheets are built out of other people's sourced words, and those are quoted, not given away. And the signatories on a sheet endorsed that sheet; if you change one substantially, take the signature list off, because it is no longer the document they signed.
Add your name, or change a sheet
These are developed in public. You can sign a Why Sheet, which is how a sheet gets grounded in more than our own voice, or open an issue or a pull request at github.com/Stimpunks/Why-Sheets. Defaulting to open means the people these sheets serve get real power over what they say.
How this site is built
The fourteen Markdown files in that repository are the source. This site, every PDF on it, and the packet you assemble are all generated from them, so they cannot come to say different things. Sheets that are also published on stimpunks.org say so on their own page and link there.
No analytics, no cookies, no accounts, no third-party anything. The packet builder runs in your browser and sends nothing anywhere.