EMA @ [the square]: Portland's creative hub

Thanks to the outpouring of community support from grassroots donors like you, Equal Measure Arts has already made huge strides in our first year pursuing our mission to make professional studio recording & education more accessible for students and under-resourced musicians in southern Maine.

We’ve produced over 50 songs through subsidized studio sessions generating 221,000 Spotify streams and counting! Now, with expanded access through our new studio space in downtown Portland, we’re on track to double that impact — but we’re counting on community support to make it a reality! Please consider making a recurring tax-deductible donation to help us sustain this momentum through 2026 and continue to train aspiring audio engineers while uplifting historically under-represented voices in the music industry.

To recap, in our first year as a nonprofit…

• We ran successful crowd-funding campaigns supporting local emerging artists Alma June — who we just helped release her band’s debut album with a packed show at SPACE Gallery — and Adele Edelawit — who is now attending Dark Horse Institute in Nashville, and just released her first single!
• We spent the summer hosting weekly open studio training sessions for students and adults at Monaco Studios and our partner studio at Maine College of Art & Design.
• We launched a Junior Engineer program at Monaco Studios, offering discounted rates to recording artists while providing our roster of aspiring producers valuable real-world studio experience to build out their professional portfolios.
• We partnered with the Maine Academy of Modern Music, along with the Maine College of Art & Design and Monaco Studios, to offer our first formal 8-week workshop for teens — Studio Recording 101 — and it reached capacity faster than we could keep up with!

This enthusiastic demand for our programs has been so encouraging, and we are overwhelmed with gratitude for all the generous support we’ve received. Furthermore, the apparent need for increased capacity and accessibility inspired us to search for a new location in order to better serve the many aspiring recording artists and producers we’ve heard from. We also listened to your feedback: for many of the communities we aim to serve, and the organizations we hope to partner with, our home base in west Falmouth presented a barrier to access that we felt was crucial to address one way or another.

As we investigated options for a more centrally-located space, we learned that a like-minded nonprofit recording studio — Prism Analog — was unfortunately no longer able to sustain its studio space in Portland. EMA’s board members immediately leapt into action in an effort to preserve this space and expand on its potential as a creative community hub, an initiative spearheaded by EMA founder Sam Monaco and Prism Analog director Nick Johnson.

We are thrilled to announce that as of November 1, our organization has a new home base just a few steps from Monument Square in the heart of downtown Portland!

But in order to ensure we can preserve this space and offer financially accessible programming for students and the broader community, we are calling in all the fundraising support we can get. We know our goal is ambitious, but if we can reach it with your help, we can confidently promise we will be able to do the following:

• Produce at least 50 new songs through subsidized studio time at our new Portland studio (for artists reliant on public transportation or walkability), as well as our existing studio partners at Maine College of Art & Design and Monaco Studios
• Offer extra-curricular studio programming for teens in partnership with our new neighbors at Portland High School and the Boys and Girls Club, as well as other Portland-based institutions such as PATHS and Portland Conservatory of Music
• Host a monthly workshop series open to the general public, featuring industry professionals offering insight on topics including...

• Intro to sync licensing and composing for film & TV
• Spatial/immersive audio + video production
• Analog vinyl sampling techniques
• Podcast production for beginners
• Live sound mixing for aspiring engineers (and musicians who just want to sound better at their performances!)

We believe there has never been a more urgent moment to focus our collective resources on access to the arts & education — to boost under-represented voices through unfettered creative expression — and to preserve inclusive community spaces where we can gather in-person for a truly open exchange of ideas (without any algorithms involved). If you’ve been feeling frustrated and powerless in the face of upsetting trends on a national and global level, this is your invitation to ditch the doomscrolling and channel that energy into making a positive impact on the networks and community you belong to. Your generous contributions towards this fundraiser are fully tax-deductible, and go 100% directly towards our subsidized programming for students and under-resourced musicians at this new community studio space.

Thank you — we couldn’t do any of this without you!

P.S. — if you would rather support EMA’s mission by non-monetary means, we are also looking for donations/loans of studio equipment (microphones, computers, headphones, sound treatment, etc.) and we always welcome volunteers! :)
Please email any inquiries to: [email protected]

Equal Measure Arts is supported in part by a grant from the Onion Foundation