Grants! Grants! Grants! Everyone loves the idea of receiving a nice juicy grant award to subsidize their project’s expenses. Who doesn’t?! Grants can give you access to way more funding than you might be able to raise through individual donations or a crowdfunding campaign. They can even sometimes give you access to institutional support or advice in addition to funding.

We all have job interview horror stories. Mine have included interviewing for a gallery communications position where the interviewers spent the hour complaining to one another about how dysfunctional the gallery was, getting ghosted by the HR representative I was supposed to meet with, and having an interview for a retail job consist entirely of taking pictures of me instead of asking any questions about my experience (I could say RIP American Apparel, but I wouldn’t mean it). A major feature of bad interviews is the inappropriate question. The interviewer asks you something that doesn’t quite feel right, that doesn’t relate to the job, and that makes you divulge something about yourself that you don’t want to (and shouldn’t have to) share. It’s hard to know exactly how to respond to these inappropriate interview questions, especially when you really need a job. And right now, a lot of people really need a job.

Someone recently asked me, “When do you think we can start pushing our teams to achieve pre-pandemic performance levels again, I mean, it’s been five months?” This past March in North America a giant remote work experiment began for many as an Adrenaline-fueled sprint. Organizations raced to get workers set up with home offices, stores sold out of computer monitors and tablets, and internet providers were inundated with rush requests to set up new or upgraded access. Coworkers helped each other learn how to use Zoom, access files on the physical server still located in their office, and move money without the ability to access check stock. The thought for many was, “let’s hunker down for a bit until this blows over. We’ll see each other back in the office in a few weeks, maybe a month or two, tops.” That moment feels like it was a lifetime ago.

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.

We’re in a moment where workplaces are having more serious conversations about how to become more equitable, less racist, less oppressive. If you aren’t in management, HR, or operations, it can feel like you’re waiting around for the decision-makers at your organization to implement change, however long-overdue.

Innovation is essential for supporting artists and arts organizations. If we aren’t able to adapt to changing times, to find new and better ways of working, we aren’t able to serve our community to our fullest extent.

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.

In response to massive upheavals in the arts, nonprofit, and social justice sectors as a result of COVID-19, Tim Cynova (Chief Operating Officer at Fractured Atlas) and Lauren Ruffin (Chief External Relations Officer), recognized that we need to be talking to each other. In the arts and nonprofit sectors, we need to hear about how other institutions are managing crises and uncertainty, and how they are envisioning our future. So, they started talking to their colleagues.

For any organization to remain relevant in changing times, you have to be able to change. Organizations need to be able to adapt to uncertain futures, new technologies, new tools, and the changing needs of the communities you serve. You need to build a working environment where teams are able to try new ways of working and to develop new projects, and to not be afraid if an experiment doesn’t work out.

If you are a manager who had to rapidly transition to remote work and then learn how to sustain virtual work for an indeterminate amount of time, you’ve likely felt some pressure and uncertainty. How do you keep your team on track during a pandemic? How do you let them know that they really can take time to care for themselves and loved ones? How can you make sure that you know what your team is working on without micromanaging them?