You can support the Otherwise Award in many different ways.
You can read Otherwise Award-winning and shortlisted fiction.
You can recommend titles to Otherwise jurors here.
You can attend Otherwise ceremonies and help us celebrate and serenade the authors.
Pat Murphy has 10 suggestions for how you can keep books you love in print.
You can also help us raise money to pay for Otherwise winners’ prizes, travel and hotel expenses, as well as make possible the anthologies in which the award publishes short-listed fiction and essays. How can you do that? Bid on an item at a Otherwise auction, buy a chocolate chip cookie at a Otherwise bake sale, purchase an anthology, or the quilt book, or a Freddie Baer t-shirt. But the BEST things you can do are to volunteer and to donate.
To keep up on ways to support the award, subscribe to our mailing list. You can also contact us directly, or follow us on Twitter or Facebook.
Volunteer
The Otherwise Award is entirely supported by volunteer labor. Everyone from the motherboard members to the jurors to the treasurer to the webmaster to the people who do the variety of small and large tasks necessary to keep the award going is a volunteer.
Volunteers get three things: the eternal gratitude of the motherboard, the pleasure of a job well done, and a spiffy Space Babe enamel pin. The only way to get a pin is to volunteer.
Here’s a list of jobs we need done now.
Donate
The Otherwise Award relies on donations, along with bake sales and auctions, to keep funding support for works of speculative fiction that explore and expand gender. The Otherwise Award is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, and all donations are tax-deductible.
You can donate via PayPal, or contact us directly for other options. Thank you for your support of the award!
Contribute to The Auction
Our big fund-raising event each year is the Tiptree Auction on Saturday night at WisCon. A little fund-raising, a lot of entertainment, some Extreme Auctioneering. It’s Bread and Circuses, non-stop live action, and it’s all for a good cause. Ellen Klages has become internationally notorious for her auctions. Come and find out why. Anything might happen. She has sold her own hair (all of it), a hand-knitted uterus, and a kangaroo scrotum purse. She has organized the Dance of the Founding Mothers, and been paid not to sing or do a wretched Scottish accent. She sometimes takes off parts of her costume and sells them to the highest bidder. You just never know.
Read more about the history of the Tiptree auction and check out a list of items recently auctioned here.
Host a Bakesale
In Pat Murphy’s speech announcing the Tiptree Award she said:
I would like to announce the creation of the James Tiptree, Jr., Memorial Award, to be presented annually to a fictional work that explores and expands the roles of women and men. We’re still in the planning stages, but we plan to appoint a panel of five judges and we plan to finance the award—and this is another stroke of genius on Karen [Joy Fowler]’s part—through bake sales. (If you want to volunteer to run a bake sale, talk to me after the speech.)
People DID come up to talk to Pat after the speech and the next year, when the first Tiptree prizes were awarded to Eleanor Arnason and Gwyneth Jones at WisCon, there was a bakesale. And there has been a bakesale at WisCon every year since, and at every convention that hosts a Tiptree Award ceremony, and at lots of other conventions too. People seem to like them. People seem to like chocolate. So many people wanted to do Tiptree bakesales, that the coordinators of the first bakesales (Hope Kiefer and Karen Babich) wrote a brochure on how to run one. Want to know how to run a bakesale? Here’s how.