Gigs Doing Good: PLUS1 Founder & CEO Marika Anthony-Shaw On Artists Helping Others, Wasserman Partnership, Sabrina Carpenter’s $1M Fund

Fictional sports agent Jerry Maguire once famously said, “Help me help you,” when talking to one of his clients, and his plea isn’t far off from what PLUS1 attempts to do with music artists, helping them help support causes they care about. The nonprofit makes things simple by covering the vetting, compliance and operational lift of partnering with trusted community organizations. Founder and CEO Marika Anthony-Shaw caught up with Pollstar to look ahead at 2026 and reflect on highlights from 2025, including Sabrina Carpenter raising $1 million for charity via her PLUS1 fund.

PLUS1’s keystone program gives artists the chance to add a charity ticket add-on that guarantees 100% of raised funds go to charity, with the registered 501c3 retaining 10% and the remaining 90% going to the designated beneficiaries. The organization has a variety of offerings for acts to engage in social impact with curated programs, including philanthropic advising and strategy. 

With $5 million granted in 2025, PLUS1 has granted more than $35M over the past 11 years to nearly 1,000 nonprofit organizations locally and globally. Since 2020, the organization’s programs have grown 700%, including a 50% growth rate from 2024 to 2025.

PLUS1 began when the band Arcade Fire was looking for a way to support Haiti and came up with the simple concept of contributing $1 from every concert ticket sold. 

Anthony-Shaw, who previously played viola and provided backing vocals for Arcade Fire, notes, “Over the course of the time that I played and toured with that band, we were able to unlock over $2.5 million that went toward health care and infrastructure in Haiti directly. And the question for me was, ‘Why isn’t everybody doing this?” 

She left the band in 2013 and devoted her time to building PLUS1 full-time. 

“My personal interest in building a scalable infrastructure [was] so that the industry could participate in really ongoing, meaningful ways that reflected the intention that I think a lot of artists have of wanting to give back,” Anthony-Shaw says. “We’re artists for a reason, right? We really care about community. We care about one another and being neighborly and being able to respond to the world in ways that feel meaningful.”   

New artist partners who are working with PLUS1 in 2026 include RAYE, whose tour will benefit Ripples Charity, which works in Ghana to provide education, training, and healthcare programs that help people build sustainable livelihoods, and Evanescence, which is supporting organizations providing humanitarian aid and medical relief to those in need around the world, including Direct Relief and World Central Kitchen. Additionally, Peaches’ tour is supporting the Trans Justice Funding Project, while the Waxahatchee/MJ Lenderman 2026 tour is supporting community-driven nonprofits working to increase access to nutritious food and housing resources in each city they visit, and Wednesday’s tour is supporting local organizations addressing hunger and food insecurity.

Returning artists who are once again partnering with PLUS1 include Alex G, Alex Warren, Olivia Dean and Wyatt Flores. 

Pollstar: In late November, Sabrina Carpenter was recognized with a Gold Anthem Award for her partnership with PLUS1. Can you talk about how the organization started working with her? Earlier in 2025, Sabrina made headlines with the news that she raised $1 million for charity via her PLUS1 fund, ranking as the nonprofit’s fastest-growing artist fund to date.
Marika Anthony-Shaw: I think she’s a really great example of many artists, as their careers are evolving and growing, there comes a moment of reflection of ‘I have this platform and how can I contribute to the things that are really meaningful to me and that is going to serve the world in a really helpful way right now?’ … She and her team connected with us about how to kind of create an embedded infrastructure. And one of the things that PLUS1 does is we serve as a strategic partner to artists and as a fiscal sponsor for funds.
 
When artists want to give back, it can be a huge lift of resources, of money, of time to start one’s own foundation, right?  … To start your own foundation or start your own project or become an expert in something that you’re not an expert in – whether that’s climate resilience or criminal justice reform – what we learned is that’s not necessarily a fair expectation of artists. They carry the weight of touring, of creating all of this art, of building community, navigating the public eye. Teams are surrounding them to do that. And so really, PLUS1 exists so that artists don’t have to reinvent that wheel. And that was really true in the Sabrina Carpenter example as well.

We’re really here to give artists a trusted, compliant, scalable infrastructure that lets them activate around the issues that they really care about. Not like months from now, when maybe you’ll get your foundation set up and get a 501c3 with all of the … fillings and headaches that kind of come along with that. So they can stay focused on the art and stay focused on the relationship with their fans … while we get to ensure that their impact is strategic, it’s vetted, it’s actually reaching the communities on the ground.

In our discussions with Sabrina Carpenter, PLUS1 was there to say you want to help and we’re able to truly make that happen.  … She cares so much about her fan community. She cares so much about the LGBTQ+ community. She cares so much about all of these things. And so we built this fund for her that really was in line with her personal goals for giving back. And it was the fastest growing fund, like you mentioned, where she reached a million dollars in under a year.

She’s had an incredible impact. I know Sabrina Carpenter also works with Headcount to help get out the vote and was the nonprofit’s top artist partner in 2025.
The most successful artists today build careers that are also rooted in purpose, right? Our team is here, and we have expertise to help give them the strategy and the infrastructure to turn values into real, scalable impact.

Sabrina Carpenter released a statement explaining how her fund with PLUS1 was launched to help support some of the issue areas that matter most to her – mental health and animal welfare, including using her platform to amplify the work of organizations like The Jed Foundation, PAPYRUS, and Rainbow Railroad. How does PLUS1 help choose the nonprofits? It sounds like once you learn what the artist is passionate about, then you take care of the rest. 
Everybody in the music industry ecosystem can kind of feel a scramble when an artist comes to them [and says] “I want to do something meaningful [in response] to this thing that happened in the news,” right? And there might not be the expertise there. Managers maybe don’t have time, they don’t have the staff … So, we deliver the structure around it. And that really includes being strategic. We have a deep expertise and knowledge in the nonprofit sector [about] who is doing what work, what kind of investments in community will make a difference in the medium-term or long-term. And we talk about relief efforts. … What are some of the systems that we can invest in to mitigate, you know, longer term for farmers [for example], if we’re talking about storm recovery or natural disaster recovery.

We really have a deep expertise that we then work strategically with the artists and increasingly look at giving back locally. So many of our artists are committed to giving back locally into every market that they travel to. So we’re giving back to food security initiatives or housing or like food banks in each city that they tour to reinvesting back into the communities that are showing up at their shows.

In November, the PLUS1 Impact Awards were presented in partnership with Wasserman Music. Can you talk a little bit about how you partnered with Wasserman on that?
Wasserman Music has a long history of really caring about the industry at large and giving back and they’ve been real leaders in this. The impact department at Wasserman has always been really strong about acknowledging our role – and by ours I mean the music industry’s role in a possible future and how we kind of act as north stars. … There are so many people behind the scenes as well as in front of the scenes that work to get this done. And I think what’s really something that we want to acknowledge with these awards is that behind every major moment of this impact, there’s a team making it happen. So yes, it’s the artist but also management teams and day-to-day managers and tour marketers and agents who really are demonstrating that infrastructure that PLUS1 puts together – that when we’re all working together and when we insert impact in this kind of structured way with artists, impact becomes a core pillar of an artist’s strategy and the whole team participates in the success of that impact. Wasserman could see that infrastructure piece being so important and wanted to acknowledge the folks beyond just Wasserman that are really … uplifting our whole industry and letting us participate in something that’s so much bigger than the sum of its parts.

Anything you want to share about specific honorees this year?
I’m so excited by the force multiplier of PLUS1, of the collective impact – whether it’s an emerging artist [or] Andrea Bocelli. … One Republic is partnering with International Justice Mission, while Lake Street Dive is giving to the First People’s Fund, while RAYE is supporting healthcare access in Ghana and Marina is supporting life-affirming services for folks in the LGBTQ community. It’s the collective impact of all of those [artists] that come together that’s so exciting for me. I find every partnership just has so much juice to it (laughs) and a real story that it’s hard for me to pick out a couple. … We have 91 tours out at the moment and each of those are committed to [causes such as] investing in food security and the LGBTQ community and climate resilience and supporting the folks in rebuilding in Jamaica … supporting folks in areas of conflict and war.   

What’s the best way for artists to get involved with PLUS1?
Anybody that even has questions, how might this work, if they have ideas of something that they have been wanting to start but maybe could use some strategic support or infrastructure support, we’re available and they can just reach out to us directly. We speak with teams all the time, lots of agents, lots of management teams. We understand the context of all the decisions that they have to make. People can reach out to us on our website [or] DM us on social media. We’re easily reachable. The vision that we have is really not why would I do this, but why wouldn’t I? … We’re here to help support our whole industry growing together this way and [to help] be part of an artist’s journey as they grow and develop.

What’s next for PLUS1 in 2026?
One of the goals is, of course, meeting the needs of our industry and growing with our industry’s interest in doing this. So it’s really, really exciting to see how many artists are putting up their hand to say I want in. We’re also expanding across culture. We’re looking at comedy and we’ve got a few book tours lined up; we’ve got lots of live podcasts that are lined up – so building this kind of broader movement where as we convene people and create these communities in real life … this kind of collective cultural philanthropy. So that’s something that I’m really excited to continue building in ’26.