Marcus Henderson is a new father with all of the attendant responsibilities, hopes, and dreams for his family. He wants to take care of his family, make sure that they get the right kinds of opportunities, and do his part to honor those that came before him. A few months ago, Henderson stepped up to take the role of the New York City Father of the House of LaBeija, which has over fifty members across generations. The House of LaBeija is a ballroom house full of queer, BIPOC members who compete in balls in competitions like voguing, share their lives together, and support one another when they face challenges.

At Fractured Atlas, we are dedicated to helping our community of artists and arts organizations get the resources you need in order to bring your vision to life. Often, this means fundraising.

Artists and arts organizations looking to start your next year off strong are probably considering an end-of-year fundraiser. End-of-year fundraising is a chance for you to connect with your current and previous donors, thank them for their support, and ask them to give one last time before the new year. For artists and arts organizations with either 501(c)(3) status or a fiscal sponsor, it’s also a time for your donors to make their final tax-deductible donations before the end of the year.

I know it feels like we’re barely settling into fall, but the end of the year is right around the corner. For artists and arts organizations from independent theater producers to the Met, we’re all entering into a major time for fundraising in the calendar year.

It’s hard for emerging, ambitious, experimental artists to book their first shows in a competitive arts environment like New York City. The founders of Brooklyn-based Exponential Festival have been working since 2016 to change that. Founder and Artistic Director Theresa Buchheister and Producing Director Nic Adams, along with the rest of the Exponential Festival team, are gearing up for an ambitious multi-venue, multi-artist extravaganza in January with a crowdfunding campaign that ends on November 3.

Every month, Fractured Atlas provides a list of upcoming grants and opportunities for artists and arts-based projects so that you can discover more opportunities to get financial support and other resources for your work. As a fiscal sponsor of over 3,000 artistic projects, we provide access to grants for artists in every discipline.

Mission statements are powerful tools for artists, arts organizations, or any group of people looking to have an impact with the work that they do. In one or two sentences, a mission statement can help you clarify the effect that you want your work to have for yourself, for your audience, and for donors. Missions statements are used to help others understand why you do what you do rather than what exactly it is that you do. Mission statements are about the “why” instead of the “how” or the “what.”

When you fundraise, you are asking people to donate whatever they have the capacity to offer and what they feel compelled to give to support your work. Donation tiers give a structure to that ask.

Social media can be tricky for all of us. Should you use it as a way to show yourself in the best possible light or use it as a way to be authentically vulnerable with the people who are in your network? Should you use it as a platform to talk about social and political issues or is that just virtue signaling? How do you modulate between the nice dopamine hit you get when you get a “like” and the negative feelings you might experience seeing people whose social media presences make them seem blissfully successful and happy?

One of the biggest challenges for sex workers and adult content creators today, in addition to the threat of violence on the job (including from law enforcement) is that the online platforms where they work could kick them off at any time. Online adult content is a massive industry worth $800 million. The workers who generate that content are at the whim of companies and platforms who both extract profit from their work and then make decisions about their operating terms that often harm the sex workers who have created the value for them in the first place.