Awesome Foundation Melbourne is excited to announce the second grant recipient of 2011, aMoment. aMoment’s project spreads awesome across our special city through art; leaving small reminders – teacups, baby hammocks, all with their own message – in the nooks  and laneways  of Melbourne, for locals and visitors to stumble upon. The message is simple – a reminder to take a moment and slow down, in a frenetic urban environment that can sometimes sweep us away. We’re looking forward to the next ‘drop’, a suprise for Melburnians and visitors around Easter. Read aMoment’s application below: Hello, I am aMoment. I am the street art name for a creative lady who doesn’t usually do street art. You see, I think we all get a little too busy too often. You know, walk around with blinkers on and such. You see, when things get too fast, I think we lose perspective a bit. We get flustered, make bad decisions, get our priorities a little mixed up. This makes me upset So. I wanted to do something to make people to stop for “aMoment”, take a breath and give their day just a little bit of space. And this was how aMoment came… read more →

It’s with awesome pleasure that we can announce the founding board of micro-trustees for the Awesome Foundation Sydney! As you all know, the Awesome Foundation has been spreading it’s seeds across the planet these last 12 months and it’s exciting to see chapters opening up in places like Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto, LA and many more! The Awesome Foundation Sydney has been brought together by founding members, Bruno Mattarollo and Steve Hopkins. Like all other chapters, it will provide a $1000 no-strings-attached grant once a month to a project which the board deems suitably awesome. The founding board for AF Sydney is: Bruno Mattarollo: Proud Dad of one amazing boy. Has a love of the web and sustainability. Interests include human rights and social innovation. Steve Hopkins: @trampolineday founder and coffee drinker. Working with an ecosystems approach to make good stuff happen. Jess Nichols: Cocktail-obsessed social media tragic who works on the web at @deloitteonline (part of @green_dot). James Martin: Generalising technologist and asker of questions. Greg Turner: Interaction designer and djangohead. Greg is an interaction designer and computer scientist who specialises in emerging forms of interaction, online and otherwise. Alan Rogers: Thingmaker. Suzie Graham: India, Vedic philosophy, Reiki II, Philanthropy, Indigenous… read more →

This is a post from  Awesome Foundation Melbourne micro-trustee Jan Stewart. Tonight the Awesome Melbourne Foundation dinner took place for the second time. The thing that struck me about our meeting was the amazingly rapid development in social cohesion amongst the group and the creativity and transformation that occurred in each person’s life in the space of a month. The co-founders deliberately chose a very diverse group of individuals for the Melbourne chapter of Awesome. It can often take time for such diversity to find common ground. The element I underestimated in this whole situation is awesomeness itself. Each person in the group asked to be a part of this because we obviously love and value awesomeness immensely. It is this quality that we have in common, and it is this quality that was responsible for the massive development in social cohesion and creativity in a very short amount of time. In keeping our eye primarily on awesomeness, even though there was the temptation to be distracted by our differences, this aspect pulled us all together collectively and forward individually. Most people in the group also experienced a massive shift in their personal life circumstances within the last month, from choosing… read more →

Wow. What a beginning. At our first micro-trustee dinner at  Huxable Restaurant , we were faced with a massive task ahead. Deciding which of the 32 AMAZING applicants we had to pick. After much deliberation and a fair bit of discussion around the table, we finally reached a verdict. We are really excited to announce that Melbourne City Rooftop Honey is the recipient of the first Awesome Foundation Melbourne $1000 grant You can read their application below: “My partner and I are hobbyist beekeepers who decided to set up this project as we saw a need to get involved in the worldwide effort to help save the honey bees. In many other cities around the world, the practice of rooftop beekeeping has been done for decades.  With the collapse of honeybees in 2007 (Colony Collapse Disorder), a serious risk is taking place on our natural food supply since the honey bee is crucial in our environment.  Since their existence helps with sustainability in food along with the responsibility of pollinating a large proportion of the food that we eat and if the honeybees are in trouble, we are in trouble as well. Paris, London, Toronto, San Francisco and New York… read more →

Greetings Awesome People, The wait is over. The next stage in the birthing of Awesome Foundation Melbourne begins. We have elected our founding board of 10 micro-trustees. In the few weeks after we posted the initial search for micro-trustees we had a huge surge of interest with over 60 people showing interest. We thought it might be a stretch to find 10 people so this was really incredible! It was not easy deciding which individuals would lead to the best balance for the board, given how AWESOME everyone was – but we thought it was important to have as broad a mix as possible to reflect the fact that Melbourne has such a vibrant community for people who want to support good shit happening. In deciding, we looked for diversity in professions, backgrounds and interests. For example we didn’t want more than two programmers, more than two doctors, more than two of the Deloitte mafia, or for the whole board to be guys. Also, we asked ourselves a few key questions: what mix of people on board could collectively given the most value to the grant winners? How can give the grantees support beyond simply just the 1000 grant? Without any… read more →