You can support the Otherwise Award in many different ways. For example:
You can read Otherwise Award-winning and shortlisted fiction.
You can recommend works to the Otherwise jury.
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 Award winners’ prizes and for Otherwise Fellowships. How can you do that? Bid on an item at an Otherwise auction, or volunteer, or donate money.
To keep up on ways to support the Awards, subscribe to our mailing list. You can also contact us directly, or follow us on Bluesky or Mastodon 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 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 with Venmo, or a credit or debit card, or PayPal, using our Donate button (which is managed by PayPal).
Thank you for your support of the award!
Contribute to The Auction
Our big fund-raising event each year is the Otherwise Auction, usually on Saturday night at WisCon. A little fund-raising, a lot of entertainment, some Extreme Auctioneering. It’s non-stop live action, and it’s all for a good cause.
Read more about the history of the Otherwise 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.