The Plural Association Nonprofit
The Plural Association is the first and only grassroots, volunteer and peer-led nonprofit, empowering those with Dissociative Identity Disorder, OSDD and all other forms, labels and experiences of Plurality. Our nonprofit runs fully on donations and support from Systems like you and (y)our allies. If you are financially able to, please consider donating, together we empower more Plurals.
Achievements so far
Since The Plural Association was founded in February of 2020 – two weeks before the COVID-19 lockdowns – we have…
- Educated 225,000 people through our videos.
- Over 100,000 community interactions each year.
- More than 135,000 article reads.
- Well over 5,000 questions answered.
- 1,500 visitors across our 6 conference events.
- Given 900 scholarships to our events and community.
- Caused 86% of Plurals to recommend us to their friends.
- Empowered 78% of Plurals who connected with us.
- Coordinated over 100 weekly text chats.
- Brought together Plurals for virtual meetups over 25 times.
- 150 team meetings for organizing Plural empowerment.
Nonprofit legal statutes
The Plural Association Stichting is a legal nonprofit organization registered in the Netherlands as an SBBI Stichting with KVK number: 77247183 (Dutch Chamber of Commerce number.) SBBI is an abbreviation of a Dutch legal term for a nonprofit organization with a social interest.
The nonprofit is regarded as an SBBI if it is a nonprofit organization that primarily promotes the individual interests of the members of the nonprofit or a small target group and thereby has a social value. For the latter, the nonprofit must contribute to the individual development of its members, a healthier society and cohesion in society. Rather than a membership as the nonprofit focus, our nonprofit has been indicated to have a ‘small target group’ (all) Plurals. (‘Small target group’ is a Dutch legal term, Plurality is not rare.)
In the Netherlands, nonprofit organizations do not have an one line simple mission statement. We created one, but it’s not our legal goal.
Our short mission statement is: ‘’We empower Plurals, no matter the words or labels they use to define their unique and individual experiences.’’
But our nonprofit has many more goals we aim to achieve and have legally documented on paper!
These are documented in our legal nonprofit statutes (documentation) as follows. Click open the fields to find the translation of the goals as stated in our legal statutes:
1- A. Empower plurals, where plurals are defined as everyone who self-identifies as being or having more than one individual within a single body, no matter the label used to describe their unique and individual experience, by developing and using their capacities to actively shape their own lives and that of the plural community and the society of which they are part, in economic, social and political terms.
2-B. Bring plurals into community and contact with each other worldwide online and offline.
3-C. Advocacy worldwide, for all plurals and plurality in its many forms. Including but never limited to people with dissociative disorders as defined in the DSM and ICD.
4-D. Provide information and education from a peer to peer and lived-experience position to plurals, organizations, institutions, agencies and people worldwide.
5-E. Abolish stigma surrounding plurality in its many forms.
6-F. The ‘by plurals, for plurals’ nonprofit aims to create volunteer and paid position jobs for plurals and to model and nurture plural leadership and organizations.
7-G. Contributing to empower individual plurals.
8-H. Contribute to the cohesion of plurals and society.
9-I. Contributing to a healthier society for and by plurals.
1-A: Facilitating community and connecting plurals worldwide online and in person, at events and through other services.
2-B: Reading and listening to the worries and stories of plurals and to answer their questions surrounding plurality.
3-C: Providing resources, information and advice, from a peer to peer and lived-experience position.
4-D: Facilitating publications, training and workshops.
5-E: Being involved in the conversations about plurals, by society, the media and the clinical community. With the motto ‘’nothing about us, without us.’’
6-F: When looking for new volunteers and employees, plurals will be prioritized when possible.
About us
Our nonprofit is grassroots, fully peer and volunteer-led, our founders and CEO’s The Stronghold System are volunteers and do not receive any financial compensation for their works. As we are aware of the nonprofit industrial complex, (The nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC) is a system of relationships between the state, the upper classes and nonprofit and social justice organizations. These relationships result in the surveillance, control and suppression of political movements, according to Incite.) We have intentionally created legal protection for the nonprofit and with that the Plural community at large.
For example, we know that in the Netherlands, the warmline that was run by volunteers but funded by the Dutch government, was after 20 years of faithful service, taken over by the Dutch government, it’s no longer peer-led. Many hotlines and crisis lines are government-funded and are only available to those who live in the correct state or country. To avoid such complex setups, as Plurals are everywhere, worldwide, and to avoid possibly losing our peer-led structure, we are proudly, fully community funded.
This means we have very limited funds and hence this website with over 50 free resources asks for donations on each page. Yet, we actively chose not to financially gatekeep. We have given almost 900 scholarships to our events and a 100 to our private community. We have never denied anyone who applied for a scholarship and for most events we have $0 tickets readily available, no applications needed at all. We believe that as a community, we can ensure everyone can get access and no one should have to be excluded, especially not on financial grounds.
We provide event tickets via a sliding scale, starting at $5 or $10 and refuse to organize events that costs hundreds of dollars to attend, like most, if not all other DID/OSDD/Plural conferences. Our private community is the cheapest paid community for Plurals out there and it’s all inclusive, all our members get free access to all our paid and public events, our courses, moderated weekly group text chats and moderated monthly virtual meetups. Anyone Plural (no matter the label they use) can apply for a scholarship and we gladly welcome them to join. We are proud of the fact that we do not financially gatekeep and work hard to be able to continue to provide this, which is only possible thanks to your donations.
Financial statement information
Another protection we have built in is that our nonprofit legal statutes state that ”The directors receive no remuneration for their work. They are, however, entitled to reimbursement of the costs incurred by them in the performance of their duties.”
This way we ensure there are no bonuses or other money laundering schemes possible, not now and not in the future when someone else than the Stronghold System, might run The Plural Association Nonprofit.
Under Dutch law, all Dutch volunteers of a nonprofit organization can ask for a small financial compensation. This would include a reimbursement of a maximum of € 5.00 per hour, up to a maximum of € 190 (in 2022 and 2021: € 180) per month and up to a maximum of € 1,900 (in 2022 and 2021: € 1,800) per year. However, so far, The Plural Association has not been in the financial position to offer such compensation to our directors or other Dutch volunteers, so this compensation has never been given to the Stronghold System or anyone else for that matter. We are choosing to save up to open The Plural Warmline instead.
As you can see above in our statutes, our goal 6-F states that The ‘by plurals, for plurals’ nonprofit aims to create volunteer and paid position jobs for plurals and to model and nurture plural leadership and organizations. – When we ask you to buy a ticket at an event, it allows us to hire and pay Plural speakers and to create more future events. We want to pay more Plural content creators to create more resources for the community. We want to continue and grow in financially supporting projects like Simply Plural. We want to grow our online presence and pay a freelance Plural social media manager, who helps our nonprofit presence grow online, and ensures more Plurals find out about our work and resources. We already provide our amazing volunteers with support, courses and education, but we want to pay more Plural trainers and educators to provide continued education to our volunteers and we want to hire a Plural therapist to help warmline volunteers during and/or after their shifts.
All updates about The Plural Warmline are posted on https://thepluralwarmline.org To allow us to scale, we will open The Plural Warmline in different phases. Your generous donations have allowed us to purchase the software needed to accept calls, has provided training for our volunteers and more. Now we need to save up to 6 months of operational costs, so we can guarantee continuation of service. Preferably, we also are able to hire a Plural therapist from the start, our peer-volunteers deserve support whilst or after providing support!
If it was easy or cheap to start a Plural warmline, others would be doing it, it’s not, it’s a challenge, and a big one at that, it’s a marathon, not a sprint, led and ran by your (often) disabled peers. That said, we know it is possible, we know together as a community we can do this, we can pull it off if we put our hands and resources together. So many of you are compassionate, caring and kind people, who just want to support one another and we see that all the time, because many sign up to volunteer with us, and we couldn’t do this work without them and even more join our communities! We wish with you that The Plural Warmline was open already and we are working hard to get there, we provide community and events in the meantime. Sharing our resources and donations requests help us to reach this goal and open The Plural Warmline.
As a registered nonprofit, we are also able to get discounts or free software. For example Microsoft donates Teams and other software to us. Google has given us a huge grand for advertising, so your money won’t be going there either!
We are mostly active online in part due to the effects Covid and the lockdowns had, but we did join 2 protests in the Netherlands and talked with all Dutch politicians that showed up, to explain DID, OSDD and Plurality and the need for more specialized mental health care, especially for those with co-morbid diagnosis and/or early childhood trauma.
Like our statutes say under goal 2-B, we aim to bring Plurals together also offline and hence we hope to start local community groups! Since people are Plural all over the world, hosting online events ensures most people can get access, as it avoids travel costs and having to rent an expensive building. Instead, thanks to your donations, we were able to purchase lifetime access to a live conference software, which at this time, costs $5000 per event, but Plurals will have access to this live conference software forever! This was only possible due to the fast response from the community, sharing our posts and inviting their ally friends to donate, which allowed us to afford the $500 needed to ensure access to this software forever.
Some people have asked us to post our financial report(s) on our website(s) but other DID/OSDD/Plural specific nonprofits aren’t doing this either, and so at this time, Unless other DID/OSDD/Plural nonprofits also publish their financial details publicly, we feel it is an unfair request, as we have less resources than other nonprofits and they aren’t being requested by the community, to do the same. Other nonprofits around the same goals have been around much longer and are financially backed up by large medical establishments and organisations, so they have more financial resources to hire a bookkeeper to make such a public report, than we do.
We have instead chosen to give updates on financial decisions in the newsletters we send, something other DID/OSDD/Plural nonprofits aren’t doing and have build in legal protection to ensure no money laundering can take place. It costs a lot of (donation) money to hire a bookkeeper to provide these public financial statements, we rather invest in other resources, unless other DID/OSDD/Plural nonprofits decide to publicly post their financial reports, we have nothing to hide and are looking into options of sending a more clear report, specifically to our donors.
If you want to read more about why you should donate to The Plural Association, or what our work entails in more detail, please visit our donation page, which includes more details of our works. Click here to visit.
Stronghold System - Founders and volunteers of TPA
Ten years after getting diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder The Stronghold System (they/them) founded The Plural Association Nonprofit on February 5th, 2020 in the Netherlands. They proudly volunteer by being the founders and CEO of The Plural Association Stichting (the dutch word for nonprofit.)
They are 35 years young, the single parents of an amazing child and 2 cats. They are nonbinary, white, have short dark brown hair and blue eyes. They openly identify as Plural. Ten years ago they started their selves exploration into Plurality, after being diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder, and put on a 4 year long waiting list.
Hence, in 2017 they started Power to the Plurals, a blog where their educational articles now reach over 135k people and a YouTube channel which has over 222K views. They also started online support groups where they support thousands of Plurals on a regular basis.
After following accredited training in both the Netherlands and America, The Stronghold System personally oversees the team of trained peer support volunteers, and together they empower and support thousands of Plurals worldwide. Stronghold System has directly answered at least over 5000 questions from Plurals & together they provide community with almost 100K interactions between Plurals each year!
