This month the Awesome Foundation Los Angeles funded an proposal from within! The idea that came from our group of trustees and got put into action this month is a food sharing project called Share Shelf. We built 25 small square shelves that fasten (without doing harm) to parking-sign posts or bus-stop sign posts. The shelves have bumper stickers on them with instructions on how to share your leftovers that say: FULL? SHARE YOUR LEFTOVERS! HUNGRY? HELP YOURSELF. The shelves are located all around the city near restaurants that serve big portions that are in areas with heavy foot traffic and that have a high volume of homelessness. The shelves are not TOO near restaurants to prevent loitering near entrances.This is because we want the shelves to be a positive thing for the whole community, including dining establishments!

Sixteen-year-old music-enthusiast, photographer, and engineer-in-the-making Noah Klein attended Burning Man last year, which filled him with a need to participate and contribute to the odd and unique marriage of music and art for this year’s festival.  His answer: a reworking of Ruben’s Tube, a flaming cylinder that gives musical wavelengths a physical shape with fire (think: propane-fueled iTunes visualizer). To give it his own spin, Noah has rehashed this traditional construction by finding a discarded grand piano, digitizing its keys, and hooking the mechanism up to his own Ruben’s Tube.  His words: “I think it would be quite the spectacle to have someone be able to preform Mozart’s 5th Symphony and have it visualized with fire right in front of them.” Awesome LA, with the consent of Noah’s enthusiastic, patient, and trusting mom, have awarded Noah with an Awesome grant to foster young, analytically minds and add a spark to Burning Man 2013 . Flame on.

Art is good. Big Boats are great.  Big Art Boats are AWESOME. The Los Angeles Awesome Foundation is proud to award its February Awesome grant to LA-based artist Yaron Michael Hakim. With help from our $1,000 bucks –  and his own two hands – Hakim is building a 22-foot sailing vessel known as a proa, which he will sail 22 miles across the sea to Catalina Island in mid-March as part of his greater body of work focused on travel and life-journey.  Along his two-day trip, all by his lonesome, he’ll will be capturing stills and video that will be used later for an exhibit on April 25, 2013 at the University of California – Irvine. You can track the progress of this truly awesome live action art piece, check out unutea.wordpress.com/

  The winner of January’s LA Awesome Grant is the Free to Be Me Drum Circle – the life’s work of badass drummer and community organizer Sabina Sandoval: it’s a non-profit, all volunteer, charity group helping at risk kids, kids in grades K – 12, elders, people with special needs, and prison inmates by providing loving, educational drumming events. We go into convalescent hospitals where the residents can enjoy, and participate in, the music. We stimulate them by lifting their spirits and improving their motor skills. Our 1K Awesome Grant will go toward much needed repairs on her over 400 (!!!) drums, which Sabina carts all around LA hosting her enormous, infectious drum circles that lure participants in to let loose, feel the beat, and find their own rhythm.   Sabina Sandoval is, indeed, awesome. Another thing that’s awesome – this grant pushes The Awesome Foundation over the $400,000 mark in grants given to awesome projects from over 60 chapters around the world!!!

The National Marrow Donor Program really really really needs more minorities (who are harder to match) and more young people (whose cells make for more successful transplants) to register as potential bone marrow donors. BE THE MATCH ON CAMPUS is their push to make this happen, at 35 colleges and universities in SoCal – including UCLA on 10/24. Besides having to convince college students that it’s really NOT as scary as you think to be a donor, BE THE MATCH also has to pay for testing all these guys – and it’s not cheap. So the LA chapter of The Awesome Foundation is giving this month’s 1K awesome grant to BE THE MATCH ON CAMPUS to pay for 40 UCLA students to be put on the national registry — and hopefully be the match for the someone who needs it. xoxo The Awesome Foundation