The Path to Becoming a Non-Profit
Finding creative purpose in an ever shifting industry during challenging times
Back in October of 2025, Silver Lake Shorts was kindly invited to Cal Arts, one of the leading arts schools in CA and the US, to tour the facilities and share a presentation to a live audience (with a slideshow and everything!) through their Film Commons speaker program. It was called ‘Third Space Cinema: Community Screenings as Creative Infrastructure with Jared Corwin of Silver Lake Shorts’.
We’ve had the pleasure of screening short films by many talented Cal Arts students and alumni over the years. More recently, Ben and Jared took part in portfolio reviews at Cal Arts this past week. It was a great opportunity to meet students and alumni face to face, appreciate their hard work, give feedback, and scout talent to screen in the future. In fact, for our next monthly screening in March, we are featuring three Cal Arts filmmakers that Jared and Ben met at the portfolio review. We are excited to share their shorts!
[Once the word got out back in 2022 and more people started coming out to the monthly screenings] they began to feel like these really organic showcases of all sorts of voices, talent, experience levels and backgrounds. And even with people from various studios and networks coming out to the show, our screenings never felt like Hollywood networking events. They felt like a party, a celebration of people’s work, and an organic, earnest filmmaking and animation community.
In May 2023, the Writers Guild of America voted to strike. The studios and networks needed to address a host of serious issues threatening the dignity of creative labor in Los Angeles, including stagnant pay for writers in the streaming era, the lack of residuals for writers from successful shows on streaming, the fact that writers rooms were getting smaller and smaller and the existential threat of AI coming for writer’s jobs. This all came hand in hand with other concerning industry trends like larger media conglomerates buying up smaller or mid-sized studios, entire shows getting canceled or removed from streaming services as tax-write offs for these media conglomerates and the lack of production happening in Los Angeles due to studios and networks utilizing cheaper outsourced labor abroad and tax incentives in different cities and countries.
The industry felt like it was in peril, and the creative life blood of Los Angeles was unsure when the strike would end, when they would work again or if the industry landscape would be sustainable for them to continue in their careers once the strike did end. During this time of great uncertainty, we received feedback again and again that confirmed people looked at Silver Lake Shorts as a source of hope, purpose and inclusion. It was a place where month after month they could continue to find validation in their work, friendship and collaboration with their creative community, and a distraction from the harsh realities of the industry.
Then in June of 2023, I (Jared Corwin) was let go from the cannabis company that I was working at as a Salesman and found myself once again out of a job due to downsizing. This was incredibly frustrating, but it was also the push Ben and I needed to take things to the next level and figure out what we were really trying to build with Silver Lake Shorts. We had always wanted to initiate a grant program and fund actual work from our community members. It was a huge next step goal for us. And we knew what needed to be done to make this happen: We had to turn Silver Lake Shorts into a full fledged Non-Profit.
In applying to be a Non-Profit, Ben and I had to think clearly about what made us stand out from other film festivals, and what our overall goals were as a charitable organization. We knew that being a festival that never charged people to submit or attend was an important foundation of our organization in making the festival experience open to everyone regardless of financial limitations. We knew that we wanted to fund short films through a grant program, and ensure that our filmmakers had full agency and control over them. We didn’t want to be like studios that greenlit projects only to harvest IP and give nitpicky notes that interrupt the creator’s voice and vision. We wanted to trust our creators and provide them with the space and freedom to make what they believed in, while also utilizing our industry contacts to pair the creators up with mentors. But beyond free screenings and a grant program, we had to think clearly about what the purpose and point of all of this was.
It made us really examine the mediums of animation, genre film and comedy and the purpose they serve society. These are the art forms that built our industry from the hard work, energy, passion and grit of the laborers involved in every step of production from the writers, to production assistants, to storyboard artists, editors and everything in between. Yet, the same industry that we built was now being taken over by massive tech conglomerates and workers were being removed from the equation. Meanwhile, everywhere else in the world, filmmakers were getting paid government grants to craft original work. With Hollywood being the biggest cultural export in the United States, why weren’t there more opportunities like this for emerging American filmmakers? It seemed that in America, non-profits devoted to the arts were only funding mediums considered more “high culture” like opera, classical music, theater and fine art. But the same love, respect and appreciation wasn’t applied to film, comedy or animation.
So we brainstormed how we as Silver Lake Shorts could help to thread that needle and utilize the non-profit system to not just elevate local artists and fund work, but also stress the artistic importance of creator driven shorts. We also wanted to emphasize the importance of free screenings in elevating people’s work and building community for the sake of the medium itself.
Consider how our creative mediums began- all artistic mediums. Cave paintings, stories told around the fire and tribal chanting are the origins of all art forms. They were collective experiences centered around community. This still rings true today. We’re not meant to binge our favorite shows isolated from our peers, rotting away in bed scrolling on Instagram, or squatting on a toilet. Nothing can replace the experience of watching filmmaker’s work in person with a live audience. We’re meant to enjoy these art forms together as a community.
After an elaborate application process, we finally achieved our non-profit status in the Spring of 2024. We started appealing to our industry contacts at places like Titmouse, Sony Pictures Animation, Paramount, The Animation Guild and Star Burns Industries who were consistently attending our monthly screenings. We were already connecting so many of our incredible filmmakers in our community to development folks at these studios without expecting anything in return. Now with the ability to offer tax deductions for sponsorships, we wanted to formalize how we partnered with these companies and use the sponsorships to not only sustain our mission but take everything further to better serve our community. Some of these sponsorships take months or even years to develop into a formal agreement.
Now we’re proudly sponsored by
Paramount’s Content For Change Initiative, Sony Pictures Animation, Dropout TV, Titmouse, 73TV, Animation+, Star Burns Industries, Wacom, Animal Logic, Asifa-Hollywood, Open The Portal, ShadowMachine and more. We will soon be officially announcing a brand new, unique sponsorship with Bandera Entertainment. We’ve also partnered to present special screenings with Sony Pictures Animation, Netflix, The American Cinematheque, Kodak, Cartuna and USC’s Expanded Animation Program.
With the tax-deductible money earned from these sponsorships and screening opportunities, we were able to fund our first five fellowship films in 2025, providing each filmmaker $5000 to make a 1-5 minute short that they have complete ownership and agency over. These five fellowships included three animated shorts and two live action shorts. We selected these films amongst 200+ submissions.
In 2026, we’re thrilled to expand our fellowship program and have funded six films this year after receiving 300+ submissions last Fall. We hope to keep steadily expanding the program year by year. We really believe in the Non-Profit funded community oriented approach to film screenings and film financing, and it has been proven to us that it clearly works.
Recently, we have also partnered with Fotokem to restore 24 classic animated films in 2026. Without this delicate and technical process, these films might otherwise deteriorate and be lost in time. We strongly believe that it is important to preserve the past of film and animation in order to secure the future of it.
Part of our goals for the future are to expand our operations all across the country and eventually even different places around the world. We’ve already hosted two successful screenings in NY and plan to have another one there this Fall. We are hosting our first screening in Atlanta at the iconic Plaza Theater next month on March 12th thanks to the support of Dave Hughes and his independent studio, Million Monkeys. We’re currently pitching to different colleges about curating screenings in which we would feature their student body’s work, but also mix in some of our higher profile community members. We believe that you should not have to live in a major city like LA or NY to be a part of a film community, so we want to try to take this model all around the country, including in small college towns and champion the creators in those areas as well. Beyond screenings, we’ve also put on comic events, art shows, live script readings, live comedy shows, live music events, and would love to do even more of these special events to expand our creative community.
One of our biggest goals is to fully fund our operations and be able to expand our staff so that we can sustain growth. Running Silver Lake Shorts has become a full-time job in itself. Over these past few years it has been gradually expanding but in the last year or so there has been a significant growth which we are thankful for but has been a unique challenge. For full disclosure, despite being a full-time job in terms of time, Jared and Ben now only receive small, monthly stipends after three years of working on a volunteer basis. We have a team of several volunteers who help to plan and produce multiple events per month, work on our podcast, manage and coordinate for our fellowships and mentors, plan fundraisers, do outreach, maintain the website, meet weekly with industry professionals, post on social media every day, etc, etc. The list is ever expanding!
We’re seeking support from our community in spreading the word about our organization, donating to our go fund me and connecting us with other companies and organizations that might be interested in sponsorship. We’re also on the search for individual donors that love independent film and animation, believe in our mission and want to become part of the next generation of cultural philanthropists. As a Non-Profit, this is how we survive and give back to our community, because bit by bit it all adds up. By attending a screening, telling a friend, or even just sharing a post, it all goes a long way to help our organization. Any and all support is greatly appreciated by our small team and helps validate what we do. We love our SLS community and are so incredibly honored to be a part of something so special and purposeful.
Thanks for reading!
<3
Karissa & Jared
& the Silver Lake Shorts Team