It is with a mixture of sadness and profound thanks that we say farewell to Shawn Anderson and Pallavi Sharma later this month. After nearly a year of planning and preparation, Shawn and Pallavi will be departing Fractured Atlas on August 31 to pursue new opportunities and new challenges. With their departure, the four-person shared, non-hierarchical leadership team will become a two-person leadership team. Lauren Ruffin and Tim Cynova will stay on in their co-CEO roles, continuing to guide the organization and engaging in the exploration of new structures of leadership and decision-making begun several years ago.

Every month, Fractured Atlas provides a list of upcoming grant opportunities for artists and arts-based projects so that you can discover more opportunities to get financial support for your work. As a fiscal sponsor of 4000+ artistic projects, we provide access to grants for artists in every discipline.

So much of what seemed impossible this time last year is now happening. Police abolition is part of the mainstream discourse, all of the jobs that we were told couldn’t happen without an office might be remote permanently, and the buses in NYC are now all free. The Overton window has shifted dramatically for a number of issues over the past few months. So much more is on the table, and collectively we can all recognize new places for our society to become less racist, less transphobic, less classist, less ableist, and more equitable overall.

Michael Lawrence-Riddell is an experienced educator. During his 20 year career, he has taught middle school math, social studies, and language arts. He has taught in elementary, middle, and high schools, and is the recipient of the Pioneer Valley Excellence in Teaching Award from the Harold Grinspoon Foundation and the Fellowship for Entrepreneurship in Education from Mount Holyoke College.

Rev. Moose is well-connected in the music industry nationally and globally. As the co-founder and managing partner of Marauder, a boutique music marketing firm, he helps artists and cultural export offices break into the US market. He helps them book shows, conferences, and festivals and gain radio airplay. As he describes it, “Most of my role is being able to not just talk to people about how the American market works, but also try to help connect people in ways that are going to be beneficial for their career. So a lot of times that's utilizing the relationships that we already have and trying to build new relationships with different people.” Marauder also runs Independent Venue Week in the U.S., which is an annual marketing campaign to highlight independent music venues. As Marauder was gearing up for Independent Venue Week 2020, South by Southwest cancelled. Then all venues started shutting down.

Artists often need help with money. It’s not because artists are necessarily bad with money, it’s just that money tends to be extra complicated for creatives. You might be balancing multiple freelance jobs, running a small business, hiring freelancers yourself, processing tickets and donations, renting equipment, and juggling multiple recurring payments for tools like fiscal sponsorship, a website, and more.

Art can shape public opinion by giving an audience insight into different lives, cultures, experiences, and viewpoints. That’s why Michael McCray includes a film festival as part of the annual, Washington, D.C. gathering for whistleblowers and their allies: the Whistleblower Summit & Film Festival.

Whether you’re an individual artist or budding young arts collective, googling “artist grants” will only get you so far, friend. Most of us are aware that grants and other funding opportunities exist, but don’t know where to find them or how to cultivate a sustainable research routine. It takes quite a bit of open-minded foraging, disciplined hunting, and genuine community building to keep your application plate full of real, feasible opportunities, rather than expensive busy work. Like a grizzly bear posting up at a bend in the river in anticipation of salmon season, or filter-feeding barnacles that grab tasty stuff as it floats by, there are plenty of different tools and strategies to choose from when you’re developing your own, personal approach to discovering new funding opportunities.

Yaminah Legohn’s vision is expansive. Through her multimedia arts and entertainment company, Art of Legohn, she works to inspire, entertain, and educate her audience through performances, arts education, and community engagement. Based in both New York City and Los Angeles, Art of Legohn works to represent Black culture and people of color while providing services to both youths and adults.

Fractured Atlas tries to be transparent about How We Work. Especially when it comes to the transition we made to becoming a fully distributed team. Over three years, we slowly wound down the number of people coming into our Manhattan office, and in 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 remote 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 out there about how to make working from home work for you, but we know first-hand that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. We hope that by sharing tips from individual members of our team, we can encourage you to experiment with different ways to make working from home work for you, and to even find a few tips to try along the way.