It has been a busy couple of months for Awesome Mongolia! First, Aldarmaa and I had an amazing time representing the Awesome Foundation by speaking at TEDx Ulaanbaatar about Awesome Mongolia, as well as another project we have been working on, the Good Father Project. You can catch the video here– and practice your Mongolian during the second half of the video, subtitles are forthcoming! The idea was well received by the audience and we are currently working with a group from Ulaanbaatar, the capital city, to start our second chapter (and potentially third) of Awesome Mongolia! The deans of the new group are going to work with students at the health sciences university, and hope to fund some great public health projects. We can’t wait to see what they come up with! Finally, we awarded our second project for Awesome Sukhbaatar in late October. The winning proposal was submitted by an entire class of 11th grade students at one of our schools. They will be working with the local municipal library to recover books that are severely damaged. The students also plan on starting a competition based on reading books!

After holding an essay contest in the spring to determine the winner of our first Awesome Sukhbaatar grant, we finally awarded the winning students with the grant on September 7th in front of their classmates! The 14 year old students designed a dental education program that they will organize and teach with the help of local hospital workers for the two schools in our town. The students started off their program in style, presenting their idea to their classmates after they received the grant. When they finished presenting, they asked when the next deadline is so that they can try to submit another project this month! We’re looking forward to seeing what they and the other students come up with! Also, after this successful start we are excited to share that we have been invited to tell our story at TEDx Ulaanbaatar on September 22nd. It is our hope that we can inspire other Mongolians to start their own chapters to help Awesome Mongolia spread! We can’t wait to share the talk with you when it gets posted online, we are honored to be among the first to bring the Awesome Foundation to TEDx!

Starting on Tuesday, June 12th two of the founders of Awesome Mongolia (Bonnie Nelson & Travis Hellstrom) are bringing together people who want to change the world through a four-week, online class called Everyday Service.   Everyday Service will host a terrific group of inspiring everyday humanitarians who are doing their best to make the world better. We will feature professors representing organizations like Peace Corps, Teach for America, and Boy Scouts, as well as businesses that blend social causes with profits, like Project Living Well and the en*theos academy. Awesome Foundation will also get a shout-out on the call from Tim Hwang (who was kind enough to do an interview with us) – and hopefully you too! We know that members of the Awesome Foundation are, well, awesome, so we’d love to have as many Awesome chapters represented as we can! The coolest part is that proceeds from the class go to: your choice! It can even be your own Awesome Chapter! After you sign up, visit the Everyday Service Fund to designate where you would like your class fee to go to. The class is available on a pay-what-you-want scale so anyone can get involved – even for… read more →

The members of Awesome Mongolia are extremely excited to tell you about the formation of our first chapter, Awesome Sukhbaatar! The idea has been really popular in our small town of Baruun-Urt, located in the Sukhbaatar province of Mongolia.   Former Peace Corps Volunteer Travis Hellstrom and I started our group slowly with a couple of key local leaders who we knew would be interested and are always motivated to help the community. They expanded it quickly and we had our group of 10 in no time, not to mention the support of the local government, media, plus a few other interested members waiting for openings or even a second chapter! I will act as the co-dean for the next year with Aldarmaa, our province’s educational department foreign language specialist. To get our first project going, we decided to introduce the idea to the community through an essay contest hosted by the Education Department. The topic was “If I had 200,000 tugriks I would…” On Children’s Day, a major holiday on June 1st here in Mongolia, we will announce the winner and award the student with the prize (roughly $200 US) to make their awesome idea happen! Later, we’re also… read more →