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.

One of the most amazing things about today’s artistic world is how collaboration can happen across borders; both state borders and societal ones. People who might never have met have the opportunity to work together toward beauty, inspiration, justice, peace—and pure creative exploration. Tools to facilitate collaboration unbounded by geographic location are increasingly ubiquitous in our everyday life.

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.

Carrie Isaacman is founder of Shakespeare Sports Theatre Company, a New York City-based project that incorporates the technique of 'Unrehearsed Shakespeare' using scrolls. Carrie has been a member of Fractured Atlas for two years and her project currently has an active fundraising campaign for a production of Hamlet. Carrie shares some of her process of infusing the Shakespearean tradition of using actor scrolls in performance and how she hopes that translates into present-day theatre production.

With over half of the global population under lockdown, it is no wonder that the coronavirus pandemic has been broadly characterized as an indiscriminate, universal threat to humanity. Media outlets continue to highlight infections among young people, healthy celebrities, and prominent leaders from all over the world in an effort to show that the virus knows no boundaries. However, while the “all in this together” narrative appeals to our need for solidarity in times of distress, it also runs the risk of erasing vast and inequitable differences in how people are experiencing the crisis. After all, the virus may not discriminate, but capitalism, racism, and classism sure as hell do. For people of color in particular, the COVID-19 pandemic has only deepened existing inequities.

Every month, Fractured Atlas provides a list of upcoming grant opportunities for artists and arts-based projects. As a fiscal sponsor of 4000+ artistic projects, we provide access to grants for artists in every discipline. Are you new to grant-seeking? You should check out our grants webinar. If you're ready to apply (and you aren't already fiscally-sponsored), learn more about our fiscal sponsorship program here. If you are fiscally-sponsored, be sure to review our grant application process. Here are the upcoming opportunities for April 2020.

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?”

Bronx Film 48 is on a mission to increase the number of filmmakers and films produced within the Bronx that showcase the borough in a positive light. The filmmaking initiative was founded by Gregory Hernandez, Edwin Torres, Ayaris Perez, and Christine Garmendiz, and has been a Fractured Atlas fiscally-sponsored project since December 2019. Through networking events, workshops, film screenings, and the annual 48 Hour Film Challenge, Bronx Film 48 seeks to support and put the Bronx-based filmmaking community on the map.