In July of 2013, a group of art graduates called WHALE is returning to the northernmost parts of Manitoba to continue their adventures with Canada’s beluga whales. Their project: Becoming Beluga, to create a suit of wearable artwork that resembles a beluga and allows the wearer to don the whale’s appearance. Can a human be accepted into the pod? Can we break the barriers of communication? WHALE will construct the suit using underwater cameras, a speaker on the top of the head, and hydrophones for ears, among other things. The experience can be recorded for later. AF Winnipeg is excited to award WHALE $1000 for their April grant, and look forward to hearing all about their adventures come summer.

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 →

After more than a year of stewing, and then more than a year pretending we were close to launching, AF Winnipeg is proud to finally announce its first call for submissions. The deadline is Thursday the 22nd, and the grant will be awarded on Thursday the 29th. Winnipeg, Manitoba is a city where many people can find ways to live cheaply, and so it’s become a cultural centre for Canada. That cheapness brings other difficulties with it, though; it was very difficult to find people, outside of rich (and too-busy) businessmen, who could spare $100 every month. At AF Winnipeg, there are two main things we did to keep costs down: We created a pool of ‘nano-trustees’, who give $100 every two or three months. We need a larger number of them, but we can rotate through the pool to fill any extra seats each month. They don’t get those sort-of-perks the micro-trustees get, like having a seat named after them, but this opens us up to allow people to become part of this process a single time if they wanted. We allow a groups of individuals from an organization to create a micro-trustee seat. The face might change from… read more →