At Fractured Atlas, we want artists to have the right tools to help you best support your creative practice - whether that’s by providing a fundraising platform and a way to apply to more grants, or by sharing the ultimate guide to fundraising for artists. We want you to have the tools you need so that you can focus on realizing your unique creative vision.

During a crisis, the impulse is to help. But it’s hard to know where to start. In the case of the coronavirus pandemic, you might be pulled in a number of different directions. Should you donate to the staff funds for the coffee shops, bars, bookstores, movie theaters, and nightclubs that you would ordinarily be visiting? Should you donate to the big national fundraisers or to small, local, specific ones? Should you focus on food security or making sure that essential workers have enough PPE to keep themselves safe? How many voicemails should you leave for your political representatives?

It is frustrating and sad to have to cancel shows and performances for the sake of public safety. You might have had to cancel your first solo show, and MFA show, or your directorial debut. Not being able to gather in person for shows or performances is emotionally challenging, and also logistically challenging. You’ll have to work through contracts, payouts, and vendors to cancel a show with as little fallout as possible.

On Thursday, April 16, only a few weeks after small businesses (and the big businesses that found the right loopholes) started applying for loans through the $349 billion Payment Protection Program, the funds dried up. Because freelancers and independent contractors didn’t get to start applying until April 10, they have been especially left behind by this first round of aid. Amidst very deep frustration and confusion about what comes next, there’s a bit of hope. It looks like more funding is on the way for small businesses and independent contractors.

At Fractured Atlas, we try to be transparent about How We Work. Especially when it comes to the transition we made to becoming a fully distributed team. We slowly wound down the number of people coming into our Manhattan office, and as of late 2019, we fully flipped the switch. Here’s what it looked like for us to transition to a virtual team. Even in our own team, we’ve seen that people approach virtual working differently. With the freedom to organize our days outside of an office, we’ve each had to find out what kinds of schedules work for us, how to recharge during the day, and how to organize our workspaces. There’s a lot of information flying around about how to make working from home work for you, but we know first-hand that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach.

I can’t remember a time when art seemed more crucial to our collective survival.

One of the major challenges with a switch from working in an office to working from home is figuring out how to manage teams. How can you effectively provide your team with the resources they need to do their work? How can you make sure that they know what your team is working on without micromanaging? How does your whole management philosophy change when you don’t have an office and can’t physically see or meet with your team?

We’re all anxiously awaiting the time when we can “go back to normal” after social isolation, quarantine, and all of the other measures we’re taking to protect ourselves and our community from COVID-19. We want to go over to our friends’ apartments, go to coffee shops, bookstores, and bars. We want to have picnics and go out dancing. We want to hug each other. But we also have an opportunity to think about the ways in which we don’t want to go back to normal. For so many of us, normal is food and housing insecurity, living paycheck to paycheck, inadequate healthcare, work environments that don’t accommodate accessibility needs, toxic bosses, and more. We don’t want to go back to normal. We want better. As writer Aja Barber puts it, “what world do you want to return to?”

For everyone who has just started working from home, we know that you’re experiencing a huge shift in your work life and in your day-to-day. Fractured Atlas took a long time to transition to being a fully distributed team, finally making the leap at the end of 2019. We’ve had a lot of time to think about the challenges of virtual work. Over time, and through plenty of trial and error, we have been able to build a virtual office culture in line with our values and our mission, that supports the team as individuals as well as workers. For all of you who are just entering the world of working from home, we know that it’s challenging. And especially challenging if you work in a sector that’s not used to virtual working, like the arts or nonprofits. Plus, any issues you might be having working from home are almost certainly compounded by everything else that’s on your mind as a result of COVID-19, which is why you’re working from home in the first place.

At Fractured Atlas, we’ve always tried to be transparent about How We Work. Especially when it comes to the transition we slowly made to becoming a fully distributed team. We slowly wound down the number of people coming into our Manhattan office, and as of late 2019, we fully flipped the switch. Here’s what it looked like to transition to a virtual team. Even in our own team, we’ve seen that people approach virtual working differently. With the freedom to organize our days outside of an office, we’ve each had to find out what kinds of schedules work for us, how to recharge during the day, and how to organize our workspaces. There’s a lot of information flying around about how to make working from home work for you, but we know first-hand that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach.