It’s with great pleasure that we can announce that the first recipient of the Awesome Foundation Sydney grant is the team from Big Fag Press, who submitted an awesome application to us in March. The guys at BFP have at their disposal a huge printing press, which they are going to use to create a unique map of the Sydney suburb of Woolloomooloo. Here is an extract from their application, to give you some idea of what it’s all about. Woolloomooloo is awesome. It contains some of the wealthiest bankers, swankiest restaurants, and pristine apartments in Sydney; it also contains a huge population of homeless folks, plenty of public housing, and loads of social services and cultural institutions. Its current urban form was made possible through union Green Bans in the 1970s. For the first time ever, our map will put all this conflicted data on a two dimensional inky collision course. To create the map, the team will print up a ‘first version’ of the suburb map and then walk around the area. They will mark on the map, by hand, anything ‘weird and wonderful and important that we happen to bump into.’ They will then take this information and… read more →

Gruezi* World! Awesome Foundation Zurich has just gone live. Today, we are proud to announce the launch of the Awesome chapter Zurich – only the second one on the European continent (the UK doesn’t count, right?). We have no other motivation than the fact that we see a lot of undiscovered awesomeness in Switzerland. Things are truly bubbling here and it is about time some of the things that are going down in the land of chocolate and cheese get noticed, acknowledged, hellyeah’d and awesomeized. That’s what we are here for. We are ten people from all walks of life aiming to come together four times a year to award 1000 CHF to awesome project ideas, that they may see the light of day. We are accepting first application as of now (we try to communicate in German, but English is no problem either). *Gruezi is how we say “Hello” around here.

Hi. CHicago is launching today. Could use advice: how you do best let people in your city know you exist? I’m sending out a press release–but if any of you have friends in Chicago, please ask them to tell people about us, and send friends to our new Facebook page. Thanks!