One in five Canadian moms struggle to provide clean diapers for their children. Kristina Prins has organized a city-wide diaper drive to address the need and bring awareness to the issue, and she has won Awesome Foundation – Calgary’s $1,000 no-strings-attached micro-grant for March 2013.

March has some great days like Pi Day and the Ides of March, but the most awesome of them all is pitch night! Come out to Lone Star at 6:30PM on Thursday, 21 March and see what projects want $1,000 cash to make Kingston an even more awesome place.  Lone Star is generously waiving the requirements for us to rent the upstairs space, so if you don’t already have dinner plans, we invite you to come have supper there beforehand!  RSVP on the Facebook Event so we know you’re coming – it’s free and open to all.   If you’ve never been out to a pitch night before, the format is similar to Dragon’s Den: each project gets 90 seconds to make an “elevator pitch”, followed by a 7-minute open Q&A from the audience. After all the pitches have presented, the trustees ‘scrum’ to pick one project that’ll walk away with $1,000 cash in a designer paper lunchbag. Check out last month’s pitch party wrap-up!   But that’s not all!  Stick around after the microgrant is given away for Awesome Hours – a time to hang out with trustees, volunteers, past pitchers, and enthusiastic community members to chat about the Awesome… read more →

Calgary has a demolition addiction and a collective of local artists striving to transform 11 houses scheduled for destruction into wonderful pieces of temporary art has won Awesome Foundation – Calgary’s February 2013 $1,000 micro-grant.

This past November, we at Awesome Foundation Winnipeg awarded our first grant. It went to Lunches with Love, a small charitable organization run by 12-year-old Nate Unrau and his mother Elsie. They accept donations of winter clothing and food items, and use that to provide Winnipeg’s Main Street Project with sandwiches and warm clothing. Lunches with Love was started in October of 2012, after Nate attended an event called We Day, at which youth are are encouraged to make a difference in their communities. On their first day, they donated 47 lunches to the Main Street Project. Now, Nate is being invited to speak to the other students of his old school about how to do what he did. Every second Saturday since then, the Unraus gather volunteers in their home and pack hundreds of lunches: Tuna salad, egg salad, oranges, bottled water, and sometimes other things. Every Sandwich Day since they started, Lunches with Love has made more and more sandwiches. Their original goals were for 100-130 lunches each time. Nate and Elsie were able to put the Awesome Foundation’s grant to quick use. The day after the award ceremony, they braved the bitter cold to buy 120 pieces… read more →

On Thursday, 21 Feb 2013, Awesome Kingston gathered at the beautiful Renaissance Event Venue to hear some great pitches from the community and host Awesome Hours. Check out how it went!