TAPE Collective Los Angeles is launching our biennial fundraiser campaign and we have exciting news to come along with it! As a mostly volunteer run organization, we are thrilled to announce we are hiring for a newly created staff position: an Operations Coordinator.

T.A.P.E. Collective is a Los Angeles-based 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to the creation, exhibition, and preservation of analog media. We achieve our mission through affordable education, workshops, equipment rentals, events, screenings and digitizing. Since 2022, TAPE Los Angeles has been funded entirely from service-based income, public donations, and affordable membership dues. Our staff was completely volunteer until this year, when we made steps towards a more sustainable worker-owned model. The emerging model is based on equal pay for equal work, better structuring ourselves for the long-run, while centering workers’ needs with competitive pay and new positions in the arts, media and archival industry.

Your donation will sustain the new Operations Coordinator position into the future, extending our current budget to build not just a short contract, but a meaningful staff role. This means that we can keep our services free or affordable for our patrons, while also expanding our capacity to meet demand.

The Operations Coordinator will help sustain open walk-in drop off/pick up hours for home video digitizing and equipment rental, support our volunteers and volunteer coordinator, and assist the workload of our part-time staff, supporting their projects and giving them the ability to sustainably work on new projects. This role means more home videos digitized, more equipment lent out to the community, FREE events and lots of rare videotapes playing in VCRs!

Why is this so vital at this juncture for TAPE Los Angeles?

As an organization younger than 5 years old, we’ve already been able to accomplish exciting milestones in our service. Last year, our volunteers digitized 414 home video tapes, totaling 9.1 terabytes of files created and 410 hours of memories preserved. The work has been stewarded by an entirely volunteer-run digitization working group called the AV League, trained to museum and archive standards of technical preservation and care. The service is entirely donation based and sliding scale.

We also maintain our film and video equipment rental library for the Los Angeles community at a fraction of the cost of rental houses. This includes 16mm Bolex Cameras for $25 a day, paired with our film education classes which cost less than $100. Our aim is to bridge lack of access to equipment for artists and individuals working outside mainstream production paradigms.

Some exciting projects that have kept us busy for 2026 were also milestones—this year we signed our first preservation contract, providing services to a long-standing community organization we care about – APLA (AIDS Project Los Angeles) Health. We are working to preserve their culturally significant analog media archives and are excited to do so at accessible rates. Our worker-volunteer model makes it possible to expand our ability to make our work accessible to organizations that have limited funds earmarked for preservation projects.

We’ve also begun working to support the DIY Memory Lab in the Octavia Lab maker-space in Downtown’s Los Angeles’s Central Library, a rapidly expanding resource in LA that has inspired maker-spaces internationally due to its popularity and functionality. TAPE helps with machine maintenance and works to provide active volunteers for guidance around digitizing within the library’s self-guided DIY structure. We are honored to support the Octavia lab, which has 21,000 members and with 1000+ new signups just this last August-- clearly an important access point for home video preservation.

Our relationship with LAPL also made it possible to host our free annual Home Video Day event at the Mark Taper Auditorium, a day of celebration and preservation of personal video tape collections. Community members sign up for appointments to have their tapes cataloged, inspected, and are then guided by volunteers to view on playback stations appropriate to their specific tape format. Repairs and mold cleanings are also provided free of charge for those in need of tape remediation before playback.

Our worker-volunteer model enables TAPE to offer these extremely affordable services, rental rates, events, and vendor contracts consistently at a fraction of the cost of commercial competitors. More access means more time – more time coordinating with patrons, volunteers, and re-vamping our systems to better serve our patrons. We recognize that to move forward sustainably we must dedicate our budget and fundraising to training and sustaining an operations coordinator to help us manage increased demand.

That's why it was a huge deal for TAPE to receive a $15k anonymous donation this past June – and we’re seeking to match that with this fundraiser! The donor wanted to know the money would be spent to help us land comfortably in our new location with Whammy! at 1200 N Alvarado St in Echo Park.

So far the funds of that generous donation have been spent on:

- 3 months of rent set aside for stability
- A new video frame sync for more digitizing capacity – yes two digitization racks!
- Liquid cash for paying our teachers as contractors
- Staff and administrative stipends

We currently have $2k left of this initial donation and it has helped us dream up what it would mean to be able to create a new staff position. We will be raising another $15k total to sustain a year’s long contract to work with TAPE in this newly created position, and to gather crucial funding for our affordable digitization and equipment rental services.

We are fundraising in the spirit of a match fund to continue this community enthusiasm and to be transparent about increasing our offerings and meeting community demand.

Your matching donation will help TAPE provide:

Longer Operations Coordinator contract

Standardized drop off/pick up times for Home Video Digitization

Increased logistical support for our volunteer-run services

Extremely affordable Equipment Rental prices for week-long rentals, encouraging more time and flexibility with our rentals

Help us achieve these goals by matching this generous anonymous donation and making it go much further!!

Thank you for considering a donation today and for all the continued support!

T.A.P.E. Los Angeles Biennial Fundraiser