Happy Birthday to us! Awesome Foundation Melbourne is turning 3, and we want to celebrate with you! Hosted by the good people at Pozible at their new Collingwood offices, we want to celebrate the last 3 years of Awesome Foundation Melbourne with a birthday party. Have a drink or two with us and sit back and relax as we wish ourselves happy birthday. In between the good people, free alcohol and fun times, the recipient of our $3000 mega grant will be announced and voted upon on the night, and you’re involved. Your pledge will give you one vote to decide the winner of the Awesome mega grant. If you like face painting, live music from DJs and bands, balloon animals, cake, and giving grants to awesome projects, come down and celebrate with us! We only have 150 tickets, so don’t miss out! Ticket sales end 11am Friday 21st March: pozible.com/awesomebirthday Date: Friday 21st March Time: 7pm – 1am Location: Unit 2, 108 Langridge St, Collingwood, 3066

Solving the world’s beer storage problem. Last night Awesome Squared got together at Claremont Tonic in South Yarra (go there – real good), to eat all the Asian food and hear Andrew tell us his best pick-up line to date. We won’t spoil it for you, but maybe you’ll be lucky enough to hear it from the man himself. This month’s grant when to a simple but clever idea that will hopefully soon become a household name. The Beer End. “It’s like a bookend for your beer.” You should get the general gist. It’s a problem that most of us face, every day: Stacking beer or wine bottles in the fridge, without them rolling about or taking up too much space. We all like to have beer – or cruisers (ew) or whatever in the fridge for when friends come round. So now we can have more and they won’t move about. Good one, Zac Martin. The money will go towards enlisting an industrial designer to make the first prototype.  

On Wednesday we spent money. On ourselves and on others. We ate pizza at Rita’s on Johnston Street. If you’re ever around and ever hungry, head there. We talked about many things, and finally we talked about All Of The Numbers. Kealey Nutt has a very cute dog. She also has an awesome idea: A Melburnian web based radio station. Think ‘RRR for geeks’ – as Kealey puts it. To sum it up as best as we can, think Broadsheet, Process Journal, and various blogs that discuss our interests, obsessions, and possibly aversions. Now take all that content and discuss it on radio – with comedians, designers, entrepreneurs, storytellers, musicians and more. The $1K will help with the funding of setting up and executing the station.We’re excited to see – and listen to – what’s next.

July was an especially awesome month for the Melbourne Awesome Foundation. We were able to give not one, but two awesome projects something to get excited about. Swarm, Australia’s only online community management conference asked us to pick an awesome community project to give a free weekend pass to participate and be featured in what will no doubt be one awesome conference for community managers from all over Australia on the 13-14 September. The conference is made by community managers, for community managers, and mixes practical tips with provocative big picture thinking. It’s a transdisciplinary event, with contributors from a diverse range of industries and academia. It’s a peer support community, intended to give community managers in Australia a voice, and facilitate dynamic professional development. (If this sounds like something you’d like to attend you can register here) We had a large number of community applications to choose from and only managed to find one lemon in the bunch, The Lemon Tree Project. The Lemon Tree Project is about creating a place in every street for neighbors to congregate and share. Their vision is to get a communal lemon tree and a park bench in as many streets and reserves around the world as possible. Awesome,… read more →

Here at Awesome Melbourne we are champing at the bit to stand at the edge of awesome and are constantly on the hunt to present you guys with something a little radical. In February we held the Awesome Party where you guys joined use in forwarding $4,317 to the universe with our first mega grant. That set the bar at a height of pretty epic proportions! Until now… The less awesome news: We will be holding off on the June grant, but our sister Awesome Squared will still be granting $1,000 this month. The totally awesome news: We will be giving away $1,000 in July…and the July grant winner will get to speak at TEDxMelbourne about their awesome idea with spreading! You know TEDxMelbourne, right? That massive event where rad people talk, influence and ignite real conversations. And just like us, they don’t ask permission, they just do. This is a crazy awesome platform guys. Not only are we giving you a $1,000 micro-flash of cash to catalyse your project, you will also receive the rare opportunity to share your idea with a massive audience of awesome, diverse and influential people! So let’s break it down: – The winner will… read more →