Smashboard is a non-profit anti-oppression platform oriented to collective liberation. Within our core team, we are racialised, caste-privileged, and disabled.
Our work is guided by the following values and frameworks:
- 2SLGBTQIA+ (Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and/or Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, + represent all other ways in which people may self-identify)
- anti-ageist
- abolitionist
- anti-capitalist
- anti-carceral
- anti-caste
- anti-fascist
- anti-genocide
- anti-imperialist
- anti-Islamophobic
- anti-majoritarian
- anti-militarist
- anti-racist
- anti-vectoralist
- black liberation
- climate justice
- decolonial
- disability justice
- embodied activism
- fat liberation
- harm reduction
- Indigenous sovereignty
- labour justice
- migrant justice
- neurodivergence-affirming
- queer- and trans-affirming
- refugee justice
- reproductive justice
- sex worker-affirming
- transformative justice
A Note on Ableism, Disability, and Mental Health
We understand that ableism shapes the experience of disabled people and people experiencing psychological distress. Our approach is informed by disability justice: access, interdependence, collective care, and the knowledge disabled people hold about our own bodies and lives. We approach distress through a liberatory, non-pathologising lens, without treating diagnostic frameworks as the only way to understand human experience. We are critical of the medical-industrial complex when it pathologises, controls, or extracts from people, while recognising that medical care, medication, and diagnoses can also be important or necessary.
What We Do
We currently run an independent online magazine featuring work from writers around the world. If you’d like to write for us, you can read our submission guidelines here. We also have evolving AI-use guidelines. We use AI selectively while remaining critical of its harms.
Smashboard began with a broader vision for an alternative to mainstream social media platforms: a digital space and app dedicated to community, mutual support, and resource-sharing. You can read more about that below, under “The Smashboard App”.
Our organisational objectives include advocacy to address structural oppression and interpersonal violence, advancing the inherent dignity of all, imagining and creating cultures of care and interdependence, and collaborating with organisations that hold shared values.
How We Work
We work on crip time and resist urgency culture, including the pressure to be constantly producing and posting for algorithms. We rely on the continued engagement and trust of our readers, collaborators, and social media followers—people choosing to return and engage with our work.
Much of the work at Smashboard is done pro bono by the core team. We are accountable to our values and to the people we work with. We make no claim to movement leadership.
Accountability, Repair, and Boundaries
We are constantly evolving and re-evaluating how our work can reflect our values with limited means. We also recognise that none of us exists outside the systems we are trying to change, and that we may internalise and reproduce some of their assumptions and biases.
Informed by transformative justice, we resist disposability, public shaming, and punishment. We believe accountability can include repair, changed behaviour, boundaries, and consequences without reducing people to the worst thing they have done.
We strive to minimise harm while recognising that we will make mistakes, change our minds, and continue learning.
Smashboard is an evolving project, so older work may not always reflect our current politics, language, or understanding. We welcome good-faith engagement with that evolution.
Scale and Funding
We have chosen not to pursue investment through conventional capitalist funding models. Instead, we rely largely on donations, which are periodic and usually modest. We also recognise that none of us can exist entirely outside capitalism: people still have to earn a living for their survival.
If you would like to support Smashboard through a donation, please write to us at info@smashboard.org for information about tax-deductible giving.
The Smashboard App
Our award-winning app concept was designed in part from the idea that, more than the traumatic event itself, what happens afterwards can determine whether a victim/survivor is further traumatised or continues leading a whole life. The app was also imagined as an alternative to the extractive logic of Big Tech: surveillance, data extraction, algorithmic manipulation, attention capture, and platform models that turn people’s relationships and activity into value for corporations.
The goal of the app was to reduce isolation and make it easier for people to speak their truth, seek and offer support, share resources, and find connection, particularly where shame, disbelief, lack of support, or institutional failure can deepen harm. We launched a prototype, which ran into delays.
People with the funds often found our concept threatening or "too strident". It required them to accept that patriarchal and intimate partner violence are real. And our app was going to confront that head-on. Development of the app is currently suspended because of funding constraints, while the publication remains active. Read more about the Smashboard app.
The Name "Smashboard"
We were thinking of “a dashboard to smash patriarchy.” Our tagline is “your digital ally to smash patriarchy.” Over time, we have also reflected on the name differently. “Smash” is not especially soft, and it can evoke violence. We see that. We have kept the name because we don't want to get perfectionistic about it now. And we like its irreverence. It is unapologetic in asking for care, connection, and empowerment—things that can unsettle the structures through which patriarchy maintains power.
If you would like to support Smashboard through a donation, please write to us at info@smashboard.org for information about tax-deductible giving. You can also send us questions or let us know if there are any errors on the website.
