Compass Arts Creativity Project Annual Report 2025:
Becoming the Organization We Want To Be
2025 was a difficult year for people and nonprofits alike. Our organization, like many others, faced a landscape with fewer opportunities for funding and decreased support for social justice organizations, even as the needs in our community grew greater. This challenging time coincided with a period in which Compass Arts has been looking inward, thinking hard about our mission to build equitable communities through creativity and how to grow and sustain that work. We have chosen to approach our future through the intentional practice of liberation. In our workplace structure, our programming, and our mission, we are striving to shed structures and challenge beliefs that favor inequality, discourage curiosity, and lead to burnout. We seek to be a healthy model for other nonprofits. Moreover, we want to continue to find ways to work in collaboration with our community to build connections, sustain hope, teach the power of change through creativity, and share the arts in ways that are accessible to all. Here is how we worked towards these goals in 2025.
OUR PROGRAMMING
Equitable and Accessible
In 2025, over a third of our programming – 34% – was provided free to the community.
All of our classes and workshops are offered with a sliding-scale option that allows students experiencing financial hardship to name their own price. In 2025, we provided $8,511 in sliding-scale financial and scholarship assistance to students.
Serving the Needs of Our Community
By partnering with local schools and community organizations, we are able to provide programs for children and families for whom arts programs may be otherwise out of reach. Our community programs have accessible locations and free access for all.
In 2025, we entered our second year of collaboration with the Beacon City School District, bringing nine after-school arts programs to elementary and middle school students.
These programs ranged from 10 to 20 weeks and were free for all participating students. The offerings from Compass teaching artists included theater, dance, songwriting, improv, writing, photography, ceramics, poetry writing, singing, and choreography.
For the fourth year running, Compass Arts brought free preschool art and music classes to Astor Head Start, a federally funded school that offers early childhood education, health, nutrition and social services to children from low-income families and children with disabilities.
Through our Community Activities Table, we provided free family art activities at city events, including Spirit of Beacon Day, the Beacon Farmers Market, Beacon Family Pride, the I Am Beacon Back To School Block Party, and the Taproots Festival.
Watch a video about our 2025 after-school Drama Club at South Avenue Elementary School
Creating Connection and Relationships
Our Beacon Rising Choir, which started with just 13 women in 2017, has grown to 84 female and nonbinary singers. These folks of all ages come together weekly to rehearse vibrant, socially resonant works by female, LGBTQIA+, and BIPOC composers and arrangers. This year, they welcomed more than 400 audience members at their spring concert.
But Beacon Rising is more than a choir. Month after month, these singers show unwavering support for one another, helping their fellow choir members in times of distress and lifting them up in moments of joy. It is a powerful community forged through making music together and committing to mutual aid.
Read about the healing power of Beacon Rising Choir in this 2025 feature from Chronogram Magazine:
Helping Students Find Their Creative Voice
From our signature Musical Stew and Tactile Explorers classes for babies and toddlers; to our summer camps, arts holidays, and roleplaying groups for kids, to our adult theater classes, choir, and family art workshops, we are teaching our students that they are artists whose unique stories matter to the world. Our classes integrate restorative practices to make everyone feel safe and included. We focus on process over product, valuing the acts of creating, collaborating and learning.
OUR WORKPLACE
Shared Space, Shared Leadership
Part of our growth as an organization is questioning norms of power and ownership.This year, Compass Arts moved our classrooms from a private studio into a shared space at First Presbyterian Church of Beacon. This arrangement has given us greater financial freedom. It has also put us in relationship with other nonprofits that use the space. Together, we are all learning how to exist in community as we work for the common good.
One of our long-term goals at Compass Arts is a shared leadership structure. We are learning from other examples of democratic workplaces, both local (The Good Work Institute) and national (The Sustainable Economies Law Center). This year, our staff was able to put some new cooperative practices into place, like rotating leadership in our meetings and making collective decisions about programming.
Doing Things Differently
Thanks to a grant from the Tecovas Foundation, we have had the privilege of collaborating extensively this year with consultant Faith Clarke. Faith specializes in creating healthy “work ecosystems” rooted in practices of liberation and decolonization. Working with Faith has given us a clearer vision of how we want to operate. Compass Arts isn’t simply an arts organization; our mission has always been to work for social justice and stronger communities, using creativity as our vehicle. We are learning how to embrace that mission in our workplace, our lives, and our programs.
In this spirit, in 2025, we launched a new training program for our teaching artists. These training sessions function more as discussions, in which we encourage our teachers to both lean into what they already know, and embrace new opportunities for learning. This year’s meetings have covered topics both practical and ideological, including restorative conflict resolution; how to create shared agreements in classrooms; the importance of being curious in moments of discomfort; and strategies for serving neurodivergent students. By approaching these topics with shared curiosity, our staff and teaching artists are able to benefit from each other’s diverse knowledge and experience. It is our intention that they apply these lessons to the classroom, and to life.
Fundraising Our Own Way
Our favorite fundraiser every year is the Night of the Living Dead Dance Party, a Halloween party that attracts more than 200 guests. While we still rely on traditional fundraising campaigns, we want more of our fundraising to embrace the spirit of this party: a big, collaborative community event that people are actively excited to attend. We kicked off our new fundraising model in December with a dance party co-hosted by the nonprofit Clutter Gallery, with profits shared between Compass Arts and the food justice nonprofit Fareground.
BY THE NUMBERS
IN 2025, COMPASS ARTS…
– Offered 34% of our programs at no cost to students
– Held 76 on-site programs serving 700 students of all ages and ten community programs serving 200 children
– Provided $8,511 in sliding scale and scholarship assistance
– Welcomed over 700 people to our ticketed events
– Offered 9 free after-school arts programs in the Beacon City School District
– Increased the Beacon Rising Choir to 84 members (and yes, there is a waitlist!)
– Brought our Community Activities table to 2,000 of our neighbors
– Taught 34 weeks of free art and music classes at Head Start, serving 68 students, 50% of whom are students with disabilities.
2025 FINANCIALS
| STATEMENT OF FINANCIAL ACTIVITIES | 2025 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Income | ||
| Grants, Foundations & Sposorships | $88,750 | $37,063 |
| Individual and In-Kind Contributions | $32,670 | $34,425 |
| Events (fundraisers and programs) | $14,236 | $25,009 |
| Program Registrations | $106,677 | $149,926 |
| Other Income | $5,103 | $2,029 |
| Total Income | $247,436 | $248,452 |
| Expenses | ||
| Overhead | $20,355 | $40,184 |
| Administrative/Fundraising | $39,678 | $107,949 |
| Program Expenses | $191,929 | $102,260 |
| Total Expenses | $251,962 | $250,394 |
| STATEMENT OF FINANCIAL POSITION | 2025 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Assets | ||
| Cash | $86,719 | $86,460 |
| Other Assets | $7,571 | $13,805 |
| Total Assets | $94,290 | $100,265 |
| Liabilities | ||
| Liabilities | $12,111 | $13,559 |
| Net | ||
| Net Assets, Unrestricted | $71,200 | $78,706 |
| Net Assets, Temporarily Restricted | $10,979 | $8,000 |
| Total Net Assets | $82,179 | $86,707 |