Monsters general supplies, and now prints too! (oh yes and some creative writing workshops) We’re thrilled to give our November award to Lucy and Ben from the Ministry of Stories for their Monster Shop in Hoxton.  Inspired by the pirate store at 826 Valencia in San Francisco, as well as offering the best in monster supplies, the store also does a line in creative writing workshops for children, and has lots of volunteers and authors contributing their time and energy to the project. Lucy and Ben applied for an AF award to print a run of very awesome screen prints of monsters done by some very fine illustrators in collaboration with local children who described their monsters to the illustrators. While the Ministry of stories have been able to secure funding for the educational side of their initiative, before the opening they found it difficult to find funding for the products they wanted to develop for the shop in order to make it self-sustaining from revenues from the shop.  We were delighted to be able to contribute to this very awesome project!

Awesome Foundation Boston is thrilled to announce our October Fellow, Tim Soo and his Invisible Instruments project! Tim amazed us with this video of an invisible violin he cooked up at school when he had forgotten to bring his real violin to practice. How cool is that? Make sure to watch the video through to when he starts playing. Tim will use the grant funds to buy the equipment he needs to build more instrument prototypes and post instructions for how he’s done it. He’s already gone on to build an invisible guitar as part of Music Hack Day Boston with an iPod Touch. Stay tuned for a fellowship awards party where we hope to see more of Tim’s work.

It is with great pleasure that we announce that the Awesome Foundation DC is open for business and ready to uphold your rights to awesomeness from the nations capital. The board of the Awesome Foundation DC is staffed by some of the districts most committed civic innovators, ready to help turn your dreams of awesomeness into reality, $1000 at a time. The Awesome Foundation DC is (L-R): Mark Drapeau / @Cheeky_Geeky, Shana Glickfield / @Dcconcierge, Frank Tobia / @Ftobes, Erica Williams / @Ericawilliamsdc, Philippa Hughes / @Pinklineproject, Garlin Gilcrist II / @Garlin, Charlie Bengel Jr, Peter Corbett / @Corbett3000, Eric Mill / @Klondike, Alexander Howard / @Digiphile, Bonnie Shaw  /@Bon_Zai (Dean of Awesome + contact for queries) Each month (starting now!) we will award $1000 cash to a project that promotes awesomeness in the District and surrounds. Your idea/innovation/project can be sublime or ridiculous (or sublimely ridiculous!) as long as it meets the following criteria: 1.    It’s awesome. 2.    It’s got impact. 3.    It’s going to happen soon. First round submissions close midnight Tues 30 November.  To enter, complete the Washington DC application form here. For further inspiration, read more about the origins of Awesome here and check out what… read more →

Are you in SoCal with an awesome idea and need a $1,000 to make it happen? The fresh-out-of-the-oven LA chapter of the Awesome Foundation is here to help! We are a group of awesome-loving Angelinos who, once a month, will each put $100 in a brown paper bag and give the collective $1,000 to someone doing something awesome. For real. No strings attached. Your idea/project/passion can be creative, important, ridiculous, or rad – or all four – just as long as: it’s awesome. it’s local (OK, local-ish. OK, just somehow connected to LA). it’s at the tipping point, and could really use a thousand bucks to push it over the edge to reality. The first deadline is November 15 — fill out the supersimple Awesome Grant application, and read more about the origin of the Awesome Foundation. And follow us here and here. This is it, Los Angeles. We’re on the roof projecting our Awesome signal into the night sky. We just hope Awesome sees it…

Teenage Awesome Alert! For October, the Awesome Foundation (SF) is doing something different. We are awarding a dual grant for two projects that encourages teenage boys and girls to use their wits and bodies to work with the elements. Hoods to the Woods started as a bootstrap project by Anthony Carranza to get boys living in the Western Addition neighborhood out of the city and onto the slopes a few hours west of San Francisco. Some boys had never traveled further than the Bay Area before, and had never experienced snow. With a $1,000 Awesome Foundation Grant, Anthony hopes to organize another trip this winter. Check ’em out on Facebook. “My Life: The Video Game” is a 12-week workshop that will “will teach teenage girls to design, program, and produce their own video games along with splitgate hacks based on situations, systems, or relationships in their own lives. Using the visual programming software Scratch, students will learn to create all aspects of their game including the artwork, sound, and programming.” How awesome is that?  It is organized by Oasis for Girls, which is a well-established  “multidisciplinary arts- and youth-development after-school program providing direct services to low-income, immigrant and girls of… read more →