The Institute on Higher Awesome Studies is incredibly proud to present the first-ever Awesome Summit, July 21-23, 2012 in Cambridge, MA! On the 3rd anniversary of the first meeting of the Awesome Foundation, we are having a two-part summit to celebrate, discuss, and hack on our founding principles: peer-to-peer giving, democratizing grants, and making our communities more awesome. Awesome Summit: Assemble (July 21st-22nd) will be a meetup and workathon for Awesome Foundation affiliates ONLY. Representatives from each of our chapters will gather to meet each other, share advice and experiences, and work on shared resources to help spread our model even further. If you’re a member of an Awesome Foundation chapter and would like an invite, please email us. Awesome Summit: Connect (July 23rd) is open to the public and will extend the discussion to the wider community of people who are experimenting in the philanthropy/community development space. Join representatives from tons of organizations like Kickstarter, DonorsChoose.org, and New Urban Mechanics in discussing issues like decentralized organizations and open brands, encouraging engaged donors, and the legal and political infrastructure we need. We want this to serve as a launching point for collaborations between these various organizations, and as a place to discuss the broader questions facing all the new organizations that… 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.

Awesome Foundation Boston recently had a call for trustees. So many talented, qualified people applied that we decided to undergo a crazy experiment: what if we just took them all and double in size? We don’t know what our long-term plan will be; there’s been talk of eventually splitting into two chapters, but we’re playing it by ear. For now, we’d like to welcome these lovely folks into the ever-bigger Awesome Foundation family. Collectively, the weight of their awesomeness is pretty staggering! Want to meet them IRL? Come by MassChallenge for our next event on Wednesday, November 16th! Mark Birchem has been a Boston area entrepreneur for the past 25 years, branching out into the world of high and low tech startups as both advisor and owner. Mark makes time to be SuperDad, local art hound, relentless foodie, and Board Member of the Big Brother Big Sister Foundation. His wife Patricia thinks that all his toy robots would look much better on display in his office. mitcho (@themitcho) is a PhD student in Linguistics at MIT, researching formal models of syntax and semantics, with a focus on Mandarin Chinese and Japanese. He lives a parallel life in code and has been active in the… read more →

Extra! Extra! The Institute on Higher Awesome Studies is tickled pink to announce that we’ve been awarded a Knight News Challenge grant to start the first ever Awesome Foundation around journalism and news. We’d like you to meet Awesome News Taskforce, a regionally-rooted and topic-based Awesome Foundation that will be nurturing small, awesome innovations in community news in the great city of Detroit. We’re now starting the process of looking for trustees—the 10-15 brilliant people at the core of the News Taskforce who will make monthly decisions on what they think is best for their community. Ideal trustees are innovative, enthusiastic, hard-working, and widely-connected people. In assembling this taskforce, IHAS seeks a balance of diverse professional backgrounds and sectors, genders, races, and ages that reflects the city it intends to serve. If you have suggestions, please let us know!

There’s a reason why we are only now, in the middle of April, announcing the Boston January ’11 Awesome Fellows: it’s because they’re super mysterious. The Banditos Misteriosos are a troupe of Bostonians who consider themselves Boston’s mysterious playmate. Since 2007, they’ve been organizing public ruckuses and shenanigans that try to provide answers to the two big questions they’re always asking: “Who are these people we pass in the street?” and “How could we use those big open public spaces?” The Awesome Foundation is very excited to fund one of their future capers, which should be seeing the light of day in the summer. And although we know all the juicy behind-the-scenes plans, our lips are zipped for now when it comes to details: the mystery must linger! Instead, we’ll let them tell you about the basic idea: You see, we’re going to make a puzzle.  And some time in the summer, you’ll get to put it together! Oh… P.S. It’s gonna be GIANT! Want more details beyond that? Patience! Patience! You’ll find out more soon enough!  For now, we just need you to get excited, start boning up on your puzzling skills, and be sure you’ll be privy to… read more →