Rooted is a relationship between a work of art and the community that supported it. To root a project is to plant it in community and grow from that ground, not pulled up out of it. A Rooted work is owned by its makers, funded by its community, and sustained, always, in reciprocity, its earnings flowing back to nurture the ground that grew it.

Supported by the Doris Duke foundation, ROOT is designed to address the increasing precarity of financing creative careers. Funding that once helped sustain the continuity of artistic practices is disappearing, while the cost of making work keeps rising. Artists can't afford to pay themselves or their collaborators. They finance projects out of pocket, defer compensation, and spend more time fundraising than making.

The result? Projects may get made. Practices don't get to continue.

We brought artists, strategists, funders, and technologists together to understand the problem—and imagine what could replace what we've lost.

Today, artists are often asked to finance their practices through systems that take value in exchange for access to an audience. Crowdfunding platforms take fees. Platforms own the relationship with your supporters. Distribution systems take their cut before money reaches the people who made the work. And deferred compensation—when it exists at all—often sits at the very end of a complicated waterfall.

ROOT offers a different path forward, one where artists have sovereignty over how their work gets made, shared, and sustained. Without platform fees, extraction, or intermediaries, ROOT helps artists raise money from the people who already believe in what they do, pay themselves and their collaborators, release work directly to that community, and put a portion of what the work earns back into the next project.

ROOT is both a free set of tools and a cultural proposition.

An open-source system to create a studio account—pond—from the community you already have.

First, your community fills the pond.
You raise small amounts of money from the people who already believe in what you do.
Second, the pond pays for the work.
The money in the pond can be used to pay yourself and collaborators effective rates while making the work. If some compensation needs to be deferred, that deferred pay is recorded as an IOU—and when the work earns money, deferred compensation gets paid first.
The terms are set by you and your collaborators, before the money comes in, so everyone knows where they stand.
Third, you bring the work back to your community.
When the work is ready, you commit to offering it—or an aspect of it—directly to your community for a price.
The work can still exist elsewhere—commissioned, presented, licensed, sold, distributed, or exhibited. But this direct channel is a critical part to sustain the funding ecosystem around the work.
And fourth, the work replenishes the pond.
When money comes through that direct channel, it is automatically divided according to the rules you established with your collaborators. A share goes to the people who made the work, while another share goes back to the pond to fund the next project.
And then you can create again.