2025 Accomplishments: Killing It (the good way)
You know, 2025 began looking pretty grim. And then it got worse.
The election had all but guaranteed backward movement in forward-looking priorities, but we had no idea how tame Jan 1 - Jan 19 would seem compared to every day since Jan 20. Everything that we think is good—everything we stand for—has been under active attack since that day. It is one reason we rushed to incorporate in mid-November of 2024: because we were concerned that the IRS may look a lot different after Jan 20 (it does). With 2025’s blitzkrieg against diversity, equity, and inclusion we feel like we made the right decision.
We are a nonprofit media company that focuses on arts and culture programing, but we are a media company by design.
A lot of traditional media is abrogating it’s fourth estate responsibility, so we chose to launch as a media organization rather than as an arts and culture or humanities organization. Our expertise is in media, our hearts and minds are in the arts and humanities.
Socially and politically, the news has been nightmarish almost daily. Institutionally, it has been the same story. The stranglehold on federal arts and humanities grants has put extra pressure on state, local, and private grants. The K-shaped economic reality on the ground in our communities has put additional pressure on state, local, and private grants.
“Sure, history is important, but should we compete with the food bank?”
This onslaught has driven home the importance of finding different ways to support the mission—like crowdfunding and a MERCH MART.
It has been a tiring 12 months, we have accomplished a lot—pushing the rock up a steeper hill. Maybe our happiest little happening this year: We turned 1. Because we rushed to incorporate in mid Nov 2024, by mid Nov 2025—mathematically—it was time to celebrate our first birthday. One year down, 99 to go!
Here are ten accomplishments in our first official year of existence.
People-first performance growth
Grew the crew by more than two(x)
Starting the year, we had only Dan listed in the ‘Staff” section of our website. Dan, Shane, and Kareem filled the “Production Crew” section. Now there are three and four names respectively, and to be honest, they are much more than just a short list of names. Some really talented people joined our ranks because they felt like the mission matters and the current cultural catastrophe needs the messages we broadcast.
John Forster, production coordinator, reached out early in the year to volunteer to help us get our production together. As a production coordinator at ESPN, John thought he could add expertise to our crew. While he was passing out John Brown Project postcards at Sundance, he met and recruited a young documentary producer/journalist…
Sanjana Bhambhani, who has joined our ranks as associate producer. Sanjana has written for the BBC and worked on the production crew at MSNBC’s Rachel Madow Show. She joined us in September for the Lou DeCaro interview in Central Park and we are glad to have her aboard.
Liz Roche, MBA, chief revenue officer, raised her hand midyear to say she’d like to lend her business expertise to helping us build a stable financial foundation. After volunteering for the Crowdfunding campaign crew, she recruited…
Jack Weitz, student intern at UCONN. Jack is a history major and we keep telling him that if he takes a class from Dr. Manisha and wears his John Brown Project shirt to class, she will give him an A (we know this will not work, but it is fun to say to him).
Fattened the ‘Fun Club’ by one third:
There are 34% more Browniacs in the Fun Club than there were at the beginning of the year. This is partly because you forward our emails to your friends, and partly because people keep finding us. Even better, the engagement has not dropped as a result: usually, more people means lower interaction. The Browniac Fun Club remains a highly engaged email union. That means we are happy to send you emails because we know you like them.
Reminder: We will never sell, rent, lend, barter, trade, or give your email info to anyone because we respect your privacy.
Two partnership accomplishments
We helped Torrington Historical Society get listed on NPS Network to Freedom
It is always an honor to work with other organizations, especially when they are cultural institutions, like the Torrington Historical Society. In 2024 we offered to help them attain a National Park Service listing on the Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. We had met earlier with the regional representative and it seemed like something that could happen if we spent some time writing words on pages. Torrington Historical Society didn’t have the time, and we had a little extra, so offered to help.
With the help of a focused little team (Johanna DeZurik, Mark Linehan, Mark McEachern, and Dan) The John Brown homesite (the nativity scene?) was officially listed in mid 2025. We are proud to be a part of the effort and thrilled with the result.
The application packet was based on the idea that the site is foundational and aspirational to the abolitionist community. Going back to Brown’s parents’ commitment to abolition and equality, they set foundational beliefs in their children here in Torrington. The site has also been a pilgrimage destination beginning the day he was executed in 19859 and continuing today, where people still leave offerings regularly—often with notes to The Old Man—aspiring for a better world.
We added three more partner organizations!
In the ‘About’ section of our website, we list organizations we have partnered with in various ways over the years. The list was 21 strong in January, and it is 24 today, thanks to three more institutions pushing the rock along with us.
Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience, agreed to let us use some high-ish resolution footage of an in-depth interview with Dave and Iola Brubeck. The interview was mostly about Dave’s The Gates of Justice, project, but we were interested in the childhood stories and WWII aspect (for this film). Gates of Justice, a commissioned work intended to mend the divide in Black-Jewish relations in the late 1960s, is worth exploring, too.
Brubeck Living Legacy, who is working with us to license some music by Dave Brubeck and Louis Armstrong’s The Real Ambassadors album and who also facilitated (one way or another) our interview with Darius Brubeck, Dave’s eldest son and his charming wife, Cathy.
Louis Armstrong House, who we’ve yet to actually work with, but who has agreed to work with us as soon as the holidays are over and we’re settled into the new year. Many of the conversations we had with many of the Brubeck people led to the same sentence: “You should talk to the Louis Armstrong House. They’re fantastic.” So we listened and reached out.
2026 will see a few more additions to the list because of an amazing project we’re partnering on: Singing Our Journey to Freedom: Songs of Slavery and Emancipation, an Underground Railroad choir bus tour with stops between Kentucky, Niagara Falls, Northern NY and VT, Torrington, CT, and Harper’s Ferry. Stay tuned for that one.
Four financial feats:
Successful crowdfunding campaign
I said earlier that we decided to embrace crowdfunding as a way to help alleviate the loss of federal grant opportunities and ease the burden on state, local, and private grants. Well, it was a solid bet. We exceeded our goal by 11% with reason to believe it can scale into an annual program. We think it can also work as an alliance with other regional organizations, where we share each others’ projects with our “fun clubs” to see if there’s any interest.
We had hoped to launch our crowdfunding campaign in March, but with the formal incorporation, board formation, and startup business logistical chores, the crowdfunding campaign was sort of informally postponed. After Liz jumped aboard, she really helped jumpstart the campaign, and lo and behold, we met the goal of lauching it in 2025 and we met the goal of raising $6,000 for post production and music licensing.
Launched the John Brown Project Merch Mart
Another way people can support the John Brown Project is through our newly renovated MERCH MART!
Not only do we retain a significant portion of the proceeds from merch purchases (merchases?), but you can wear equality on your sleeve, chest, mug (see left), or shopping bag—for the whole world to see.
We think more people need to be reminded that equality is a good thing.
That people are people; we are all different and that is how we are all the same.
T-shirts, shopping bags, and sweatshirts can help with that.
We made the DONATE button work!
I know this seems like a small accomplishment, but there are a lot of little pieces that must align perfectly for that little button to work. It took a lot of frustrating evenings, forehead-slaps, and fist-pumps, but by golly, it works.
Merch revenue and donations increased our bank reserves 10x
Part of setting up the MERCH MART and donation button, was seeding the bank account to cover any potential incoming orders, Well, that seed money grew by an order of magnitude. There’s an old saying in business circles:
“When the numbers are weak, talk about percentages and when the percentages are weak, talk about numbers.”
Our startup bank account exploded by 1,000% as a result of merch sales and direct donations in 2025. We started the year with a small number of dollars and we are finishing the year with ten times more of those dollars. Of course, it is still relatively easy to count those dollars, because, well, there are not that many of them.
We have no illusions that it is a sustainable rate of growth, but it is also ten times more than we started the year with, so, #winning!
Two production-related pronouncements
We completed the Pushing the Rock Interviews. We COMPLETED the INTERVIEWS!
It feels surreal to report that we have all of the interviews we NEED to produce the film as we see it. There are a couple we would LIKE, there are some we HOPE for, but in 2025, we collected FOUR key perspectives, more bringing the total interview collection to seven:
Mr. Sule Greg Wilson (Feb, 2025)
Dr. Kathy Bullock (March, 2025)
Mr. Darius Brubeck (April, 2025)
Dr. Lou DeCaro (Sep, 2025)
General Enoch Woodhouse II (2024)
Dr. Manisha Sinha (2024)
Ms. Amy Godine (2024)
Mr. Dave Brubeck (interviewed a long time ago—a LOT of times)
Ida B. Wells Dramatization
The most ambitious part of the film went off without a hitch because of the people who set it up (Torrington Historical Society, John Forster, Johanna DeZurik), worked it through (Shane and Dan), participated in front of the camera (Ms. Effie Mwando and Dr. Manisha Sinha), and edited it (Shane and Dan).
Shane said it was the most fun he has ever had shooting video. Judging from the photo, Dan agrees.
We were very careful with dramatization in documentary filmmaking because we do not want to accidentally distort history. The choice was for actor Effie Mwando to read parts of an editorial written by Ida B. Wells in the nineteenth century. Adding a historian to contextualize the remarks intermittently creates a historical reading with explanation in a way that is far less boring than if Dan were reading it.
Lots to look forward to in 2026
With these achievements firmly rooted in our foundation, we are excited about what’s coming in the next 52 weeks. Chief among them, we will be releasing the first in the Pushing the Rock series as part of America’s 250 birthday celebration. And a whole lot more. Thanks for a great first year!
