Wow. What a beginning. At our first micro-trustee dinner at  Huxable Restaurant , we were faced with a massive task ahead. Deciding which of the 32 AMAZING applicants we had to pick. After much deliberation and a fair bit of discussion around the table, we finally reached a verdict. We are really excited to announce that Melbourne City Rooftop Honey is the recipient of the first Awesome Foundation Melbourne $1000 grant You can read their application below: “My partner and I are hobbyist beekeepers who decided to set up this project as we saw a need to get involved in the worldwide effort to help save the honey bees. In many other cities around the world, the practice of rooftop beekeeping has been done for decades.  With the collapse of honeybees in 2007 (Colony Collapse Disorder), a serious risk is taking place on our natural food supply since the honey bee is crucial in our environment.  Since their existence helps with sustainability in food along with the responsibility of pollinating a large proportion of the food that we eat and if the honeybees are in trouble, we are in trouble as well. Paris, London, Toronto, San Francisco and New York… read more →

There’s some new* blood in the Boston Chapter of The Awesome Foundation. Christina Xu 2nd Tim Hwang** Chair for Higher Awesome Studies (July 2010) In addition to being the Multitasker at Breadpig, Christina is the co-founder of ROFLCon, one of the proprietors of a coworking space in Cambridge called p.irateship, and a DJ for a weekly radio show called Global Frequency. She tweets about all of these things and more here. Doc Searls 3rd Matt Blake** Chair for Higher Awesome Studies (September 2010) Doc is Senior Editor of Linux Journal, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, an alumnus fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, a fellow with the Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, one of the world’s most quoted bloggers, and a photographer committed to enlarging the sum of images in the public domain. Chris Marstall 2nd Emily Daniels** Chair for Higher Awesome Studies (October 2010) Chris is a programmer and creator of the concert alert service tourfilter.com. He’s the Creative Technologist at The Boston Globe charged with establishing their Media Lab, and a fixture on the local music technology scene to boot. Word on the… read more →

Hey DC, you’re really finding your awesome groove! Maybe it’s this great article from DC’s own awesome board member Alex Howard in the Huffington Post, or maybe you heard yours truly and a few of our “arbiters of Awesome” on WAMU 88.5, (it’s also even possible that you may have started to hear rumors about an Awesome party coming your way…). Whatever it is, the submissions for the January grant were so chock-a-block with awesomeness that we have chosen to reward THREE (3) AWESOME PROJECTS. Congratulations Ward 8 Market Master! After much deliberation, we have awarded the January grant to the Ward 8 Farmers Market. I spoke to the folks over there who said: Our market is for and about our community.  For example, Ward 8 has a higher diabetes rate than ANY COUNTY IN THE UNITED STATES.  Ward 8 Farmers market offers an alternative:  a junk-food-free environment, a kid-friendly place for young ones to touch, taste, and enjoy good food and develop good habits.  Our markets have a partnership that brings a nutritionist to every market, offering samples and answering the all important question of “how do you cook an eggplant anyway?” What does winning the Awesome Foundation DC… read more →

Sunday community cook-ups After a great night on Wednesday in the Barley Mow on Curtain rd where 5 awesome projects presented, we’re thrilled to give January’s Awesome London award to The People’s Kitchen. Steve and the rest of the PK gang aim to draw attention to the tonnes of perfectly good food that is thrown away every day from supermarkets, restaurants and homes.  They collect great food that is past its sell by date from local shops, and every sunday in their kitchen in Passing Clouds in Dalston, the first 20 people that turn up (they’re always oversubscribed) cook a big meal together for the first 50 – 100 people that turn up to eat.  Again, it’s so popular they’re always oversubscribed.  They believe that cooking and eating together is a great way to build community, and we LOVE that idea.  They’ll use the award to buy some bigger and more robust kitchen equipment so that they can expand the variety of the dishes they can cook. Yum Yum! The People’s Kitchen gang are also developing it as a fantastic event that can be replicated and scaled, because of course like the Awesome Foundation, this could work in any community. … read more →

You’ve heard of Christmas in July? This is the reverse: Gardeners in February. The Boston Chapter of the Awesome Foundation is psyched to be celebrating two grants made in 2010 that support different facets of the community gardening movement on Friday, February 11, 2011. Pick-a-Pocket Gardeners – Nov ’10 Fellow: They are a stealthy bunch of civic-oriented gardeners who have mind melded with the Cambridge/Somerville Departments of Public Works to make neglected urban spaces purdy. We gave them the big green thumbs-up for uniforms, decoder rings, garden tools: whatever they need to make the magic happen. We’re hoping for capes too, but that’s up to them. Ripley’s Garden for Others – July ’10 Fellow: Thomas & Dawn Ripley started off with a 1,300 sq/ft garden. It didn’t take long for the produce to overwhelm their freezer’s capacity. They canned a bunch, ran out of storage space, and started donating the overflow to their local food pantry in Caldwell, ID. It was the only fresh produce the families and pensioners who rely on that organization got. Inspired by the warm fuzzy feeling that comes from giving, Thomas wrote to us with a proposition. “If I can feed a few, I can feed… read more →