Why Multitude Films Became a Nonprofit

Guest author and Multitude Films co-founder Anya Rous digs into how the times necessitated a business model pivot

(Note: I am delighted to share this essay by my friend and collaborator, Multitude Films President and Co-Founder Anya Rous. I have long admired — and, in full transparency, previously funded — the work of Multitude Films for their commitment to deeply thoughtful approaches to not just the “what” of documentary making, but also the “who” and “how.” Hollywood Reporter recently announced Multitude’s decision to become a nonprofit; here Anya shares more of the backstory and thoughts on the journey ahead. Deep gratitude to Anya for her generous storytelling and taking the time to write during a very busy season! -Maida)

I’ve spent the past decade producing artful, politically bold documentaries alongside the team at Multitude Films, where we recently arrived at a decision that surprised even us: to become a nonprofit. After ten years as a hybrid production company (that is, a fiscally sponsored LLC) operating on a combination of production fees and philanthropic support, we’ve undertaken this shift to secure the most viable path to sustainability and maintain our commitment to our mission.

From the start, we’ve been committed to transformative culture change through nonfiction storytelling including a representative documentary landscape that values courageous filmmaking, invests in the culture workers who produce it, and builds meaningful collaboration between filmmakers and movements. This ethos has applied as much to how we operate internally as to what we make publicly, with respect for the contributions of our team, transparency, care, dignity, fair compensation, and genuine opportunities for growth in skill and leadership.

We’ve understood that cultural production is a catalyst for the personal and collective political action needed to build lasting systemic change, that stories paired with intentional community engagement can move people to reconsider their perspectives and act collectively. That belief has guided every film we’ve made and every relationship we’ve built.

Our Origin Story

When we entered the field in 2016, the industry was riding the early wave of the streaming bubble, though those funds went primarily to commercial projects by white, straight, and cisgender filmmakers rather than to social justice-oriented work by LGBTQ+, disabled, and BIPOC filmmakers. Still, we carved out a lane, building the track record and relationships needed to get social change films distributed by Netflix, HBO, Peacock, POV, and Independent Lens, among others. We also formed a separate LLC for each project, which is both industry standard and additionally essential when making politically charged films that target litigious powerholders like policymakers, the evangelical church, or the FBI. Pray Away’s release on Netflix in 2021 drew five potential lawsuits within months; while all were ultimately without merit, our structure meant those threats didn’t endanger our other films or our company.

Mainstream production relies on a film-by-film approach, where crews and operations are recreated for each new project with limited attention to sustainability, equitable labor practices, or growth for emerging filmmakers. We built our model to straddle the conventional, commercial space while drawing from best practices for organizational development from the nonprofit, movement-oriented space. We’ve long wanted to challenge an industry that relies on gig labor, exploitation, and poor management, and to demonstrate that an independent film company could be both successful and genuinely sustaining for multiple producers. What that looked like in practice: staff producers, associate producers and production coordinators with salaries, benefits, and PTO. It’s worth naming how rare this actually is, because these are too often treated as benefits reserved for executives or nonprofit artist support workers, rather than the baseline labor standards we believe make for stronger, more accountable producing.

The fiscal sponsorship layer allowed us to receive foundation grants and philanthropic support, key to resourcing our productions, impact campaigns, apprenticeship program, and a portion of operations. Our initial vision was to phase out philanthropic support within seven years and move toward a B Corp structure; our core funding partners talked us out of that, wisely recommending we maintain a diversified funding pool. Even so, the prolonged contraction of recent years required a hiring and salary freeze, leaving us unable to fill key positions and managing uncertainty that had no clear end.

Several years ago, our track record seemed like it could reasonably project a pathway toward financial stability. That hasn’t borne out, and if anything the possibilities for self-sustaining models for politically-minded productions have narrowed further. The burst of the streaming bubble is one major factor: even at the height of streaming output, only a small fraction of those funds went to documentary, and as platforms pivot toward reality TV and celebrity-driven true crime, funding for politically-oriented films continues to dwindle. Streamers we had built real relationships with have significantly pulled back, narrowing the lane of commissions and acquisitions we operate in.

Simultaneously, the national and global political landscape that we’re operating in has only continued to get narrower for independent storytelling. The dismantling of independent media and democratic institutions is on display all around us, with authoritarianism, state violence, and the accelerating climate crisis shaping our political terrain. Public trust in the media continues to erode, compounded by the rise and largely unregulated use of AI, while multiple costly wars and military escalations abroad strain an already fragile economy, driving up the cost of living and furthering the disinvestment of public infrastructure and support systems for everyday Americans.

Like other culture producers, we operate in an increasingly hostile political environment defined by a steady expansion of state control over people’s bodies, movements, and lives, affecting immigrants, people of color, queer and trans communities, and women with particular force. The contraction of private funding and the gutting of public funding, combined with a retreat from investment in political storytelling and the consolidation of corporate media power, are limiting which stories are told, who is resourced to tell them, and whether those stories are positioned to contribute to meaningful cultural and political change.

And yet, the authoritarian dismantling of our civic institutions and deliberate falsification of the public record, sowing disinformation, and undermining the cultural means of production that could galvanize us toward different political possibilities, demonstrates that this work is more vital than ever. Figuring out how to sustain felt even more so like an urgent non-negotiable.

Our Pivot

We asked ourselves: was there another hybrid model that could better serve us? Would nonprofit status open the door to funders, arts and culture and issue-focused alike, who had been hesitant or unable to support what they perceived as a for-profit company, even though Multitude generates no profit and our revenue model has always closely resembled nonprofit accounting? We got clear messages from several funders that they couldn’t support us as a hybrid; the legal structure was signaling something false about where the money was going.

To think it through, we engaged industry allies, veteran producers, former nonprofit executives, lawyers, and accountants. We surveyed the field, studied the philosophy and governing principles of different nonprofit models, deepened our knowledge of liberatory and cooperative work structures, and held a team training to build on democratic principles of leadership that support genuine shared ownership across the organization. We also looked hard at what nonprofit structures can become: beholden to politically misaligned boards, bogged down in bureaucratic processes, mission-drift dressed up as sustainability. But every structure is defined by the people who shape it, and we intend to shape this one with the same values that have defined our work from the start.

The economics of our industry cannot sustain a mission-driven production company, and our hybrid model was quietly blocking certain philanthropic partnerships, even as our programmatic work already served those funders’ own institutional goals. Financially, we couldn’t see a horizon for keeping our doors open on market resources alone. This decision hardly safeguards us against financial precarity: it was our best calculus among imperfect choices, not a naive belief that the philanthropic sector is reliable or secure.

There is an endemic bias in our industry that projects a false dichotomy between impact and artistry, and we’ve always resisted that. Our experience bears it out: films produced with a high standard of quality and professionalism, centering stories of safety and liberation of Black, brown, queer, and disabled communities, can compete at top-tier festivals and earn serious critical attention. For us, those platforms are never ends in themselves; they are leverage for the communities and movements we work alongside. The work that sits beyond individual productions, including our mentorship and apprenticeship programs, field-building, impact strategy, movement coordination, and the care practices led by our Head of Care Dr. Kameelah Mu’min Oseguera, cannot be resourced through production fees. The nonprofit structure allows us to resource this work as the core of what we do, not a footnote to it.

Looking Ahead

We refuse to give up on making artful, political films simply because the market for them has constricted. I’m ever more invested in making sure this generation of storytellers can beautifully and boldly disrupt the status quo, and in building the conditions that make that possible over the long term. We wouldn’t be where we are without a deep and powerful community of creative collaborators, funders, movement partners, and allies, and this new chapter is built on that foundation.

The conditions for representative, politically-grounded storytelling are continually contested and fraught: funding is contracting, corporate media consolidation is narrowing which stories get told, and the communities we work alongside are facing unprecedented attacks on their rights, safety, and freedom of expression. Despite these pressures, we will not cede the narrative space that repressive forces aim to shrink. Documentary production remains at our core, and the nonprofit structure enables us to deepen our commitment to cultural production that serves movements and reaches communities beyond the film industry.

We are committed to this work for the long haul, and to doing it in a way that is clear-eyed about the structures we operate within, realistic about their limits, and sustained by the relationships that have carried us this far.