Hello everyone! It’s official: the trustees of Awesome Foundation San Francisco are extremely proud this month to make an award to Erin Bregman of the Little Opera Company. Erin’s project is simple, but awesome. She works with children between 2nd and 5th grade at the West Portal Elementary School to write, produce, and perform complete operas. That’s singing and dancing. Since they come out of the collective minds of the kids that Erin works with, the topics of these operas are unbelievably intense: previous works have included operas about evil ponies on Mars, pirates, and Custer’s Last Stand (see video above). Naturally, we’re all about this, so AF-SF is helping to fund their upcoming production in March. We’ll post more details as they come together – but from what Erin tells us, the performance is set to include wild animals, magical moons, and spooky forests, so it pretty much is going to be awesome. Also: they’re looking for people to lend a hand! If you know of a small performance space that might be a good place for it – be sure to drop us a line at contact@awesomefoundation.org. Also, if you’re interested in donating to these efforts, the Little… read more →

In the interest of awesome we’ve teamed up with Pozible, Australia’s largest crowdfunding site to expand our reach to even more awesome projects. This newfound friendship is simple and stays true to our Awesome Foundation roots. Just like the Awesome Foundation, Pozible also supports awesome projects and ideas. Pozible founders, Rick Chen and Alan Crabbe saw a need for a public crowdfunding platform in Australia through their work with visual artists who were falling short when it came to vital start up costs. The pair wanted to create a site for creators and innovators to find early supporters for their projects, thus Pozible was born in May 2010 and has since help fund over 300 projects. Pozible gives creative individuals, groups and organizations the opportunity to raise funds through pre-selling tangible and intangible rewards by posting a project on Pozible.com.au. If you donate $15 you might get a copy of the creator’s eBook, but by donating $150 you might receive a home cooked meal at the author’s house. Each project has a funding goal and a time limit (from 1-90 days) set by the project creator; this goal must be met or exceeded to receive any contributions put towards the… read more →

Here at Awesome Boston, we get a lot of ideas every month. Not all of the ideas are awesome, but a lot of them are pretty close and could use just a pinch of awesome-factor to send them over the edge. That’s why we’re starting Awesome office hours. From 6-8 PM this Thursday, December 15th, several trustees from Awesome Boston will be at Voltage Cafe in Kendall Square to help you refine your idea from great to awesome. If this is successful, there’ll be many more. Don’t have an idea? Come talk to us until you have one, or just say hi! Make sure to follow us on Twitter (@awesomebos) for updates.

Mixing a love of Montreal with a healthy dose of community building, over 40 people gathered at Bar La Quincaillerie near Lafontaine Park to celebrate the first round of applicants to La Fondation Formidable.

One of our first Awesome Foundation in DC went to Experience Counterpoint, an experimental chamber orchestra. Now, after much scheming and planning, their guerrilla “flash mob” style performance of Audio Warhol was performed yesterday at the Andy Warhol: Headlines exhibit of the National Gallery. Dressed as Warhol doppelgangers, the actors, musicians and DJ performed a musical/multimedia event inspired by the work of Andy Warhol based on Terry Riley’s minimalist work In C. See more about the performance here: http://pinklineproject.com/article/counterpoints-audio-warhol-national-gallery-saturday