A Letter from the Editors
Many exciting things are coming to fruition for Art Grove this year––we're investigating fiscal sponsorship to grow our newsletter, pay writers, and produce new forms of content for education and enrichment. 

By Betsy Podsiadlo & Tom Jakob | 1/15/24

Dear reader,

Welcome to 2024. We’re a few days late on account of taking a much-needed break over the month of December. But no matter… it’s good to be here on any date. Because if last year is any indication, then 2024 will be a big year for Art Grove Newsletter. 

We are so tremendously thankful for what our community of readers, contributors, and featured artists helped our newsletter accomplish last year. 2023 saw some incredible stories come out of our fledgling publication that received so much generous feedback and praise. From our feature of Mosaic Composer Collective to a story about Margaret Woods’ artistic discoveries through parenting, to Arjan Singh’s imaginative idea of making music out of plants, and so many more, we are truly thankful. Each and every story that has been told through our newsletter and the effect they have had on our readers is nothing short of inspiring. And we are beyond excited to continue this journey in 2024.

But our excitement is not limited to the stories we plan to tell. Over the past few months, we have been holding conversations about a greater vision for Art Grove and have been strategizing along the way to make that vision a reality. And as of writing, we are glad to say that we can finally divulge a little bit about some of our strategic plans for 2024.

First and foremost, we finally began receiving writing submissions around November of last year. This accomplishment cannot be understated––we believe that publishing the work of others is crucial to our mission of uplifting our community as much as possible. We are hoping to gain more and more in 2024, ultimately emboldening the reach, impact, and quality of Art Grove. If you believe your writing belongs in Art Grove, we highly encourage you to share your work with us via email at artgrovenewsletter@gmail.com but please review our Writing Guidelines before you do!

But up until now, the few pieces we have published have been done so for free, which is not something we want to see continue in 2024.

Everything done for Art Grove so far has been done on our own dollar. It’s not a particularly expensive project… not yet at least. But paying writers surely isn’t something we can afford to do with the limited resources we currently have. It’s a critical desire of ours, however. So how do we achieve this goal?

Introducing our first major goal of 2024: begin fundraising efforts by obtaining fiscal sponsorship. We won’t go into the nitty gritty, but if Art Grove wants to succeed, it needs money. The problem is that with mo’ money comes mo’ problems that we aren’t qualified to handle yet, and it doubles from the fact that we can’t afford to pay somebody who is. That’s why obtaining fiscal sponsorship is crucial to our early success, as it will allow us access to certain amenities and services that we couldn’t otherwise afford.

From this, we hope to start gaining enough capital to make some much-needed changes, developments, and updates to everything that makes up Art Grove. By obtaining fiscal sponsorship and fundraising even a small amount every month, we expect to be able to:

• Legally pay contributing writers a fair wage for freelance submissions;

• Build a team of editors, web developers, and writers to help produce each month’s issue;

• Upgrade our web hosting services and backend software to improve user experience;

• Develop a long-term strategy for education and enrichment workshops;

• And allow us to keep everything we produce at a low cost/no cost model.

We’re trying to be as even-keeled and transparent about everything we do as possible. We are always open to feedback and ideas, which we encourage you to share with us via email at artgrovenewsletter@gmail.com

Finally, there is something we need to address. If Art Grove is to one day become what it wishes to be, something essential has been missing this whole time from our website: a mission statement. That’s partly because we’ve spent a long time not only envisioning what Art Grove can be but also what it needs to be… what we wish to achieve from this mission beyond producing content every month.

In the spirit of remaining transparent, we invite you to participate in this important process. Below this article, you will find our working mission statement. We believe it is sufficient, but we want to make sure it is sensible, meaningful, and accurate to our readers and anybody else who might be curious about what Art Grove really truly is. We highly encourage you to share your feedback about our mission statement with us via email at artgrovenewsletter@gmail.com with the email subject “Mission Statement”. We will review all feedback and make adjustments as our community best suggests and promise to provide updates along the way. 

That’s all for now. 2024 is sure to be an exciting one for our small but mighty publication! We hope you will join us on this exciting adventure through the creative processes of others and invite you to help us however you can.

Best wishes,

Betsy & Tom