The NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theatre provides grants to encourage and support the creation of digital, film, music, television, and live or online theatre content that reflects the voices and perspectives of all who identify as women. Projects with a director or producer based in New York City that have completed principal photography are eligible for finishing grants in the categories: Documentary Feature, with a 60+ minute running time ($50,000); Documentary Short, with a running time of 59 minutes or less ($25,000), and Documentary Webisodes/Webseries of all lengths and forms ($20,000).

The Assets for Artists free artist-led workshops are available to artists of all disciplines in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. This seasons workshop topics include website management, relationship building, artist statements, resource mapping, career planning, grant building, and artist contracts.

Published by Filmmaker Magazine earlier this week, The Evolution of Impact: The Future of Social Change and Nonfiction Storytelling addresses the shifting landscape of documentary impact and the ways many campaigns go about building community all wrong, particularly when it comes to generating meaningful connections within communities of color. Sahar Driver and Sonya Childress pay special attention to the prevalence of an assumed (white) mainstream audience, writing that "we are seeing that campaigns focused on specific communities and discrete outcomes are less able to find the support they need to be effective." Instead of the campaigns with "universal" and educational appeal that tend to get advanced, Driver and Childress make a case for taking clear positions, identifying and avoiding potential sources of harm, and investing in the communities on screen-- approaches commonly thought to be the bane of the "strategic."

The piece concludes with what the authors perceive as the positive forward momentum of documentary impact: centering the filmmaking process and building out from there. They explain that "a film’s impact is first felt by those closest to the film—the participants and film teams, then it slowly expands outward to the communities at the center of the story, then to other stakeholders, and then finally to the audience who may be disconnected to the lived realities of those documented on camera." What remains is how long this present shift toward care-centered filmmaking will take to reach alignment with the values of funders and financiers who are presently creating an economy of stories that so often ignores those most impacted by a film's creation and release.