Sunday community cook-ups After a great night on Wednesday in the Barley Mow on Curtain rd where 5 awesome projects presented, we’re thrilled to give January’s Awesome London award to The People’s Kitchen. Steve and the rest of the PK gang aim to draw attention to the tonnes of perfectly good food that is thrown away every day from supermarkets, restaurants and homes. They collect great food that is past its sell by date from local shops, and every sunday in their kitchen in Passing Clouds in Dalston, the first 20 people that turn up (they’re always oversubscribed) cook a big meal together for the first 50 – 100 people that turn up to eat. Again, it’s so popular they’re always oversubscribed. They believe that cooking and eating together is a great way to build community, and we LOVE that idea. They’ll use the award to buy some bigger and more robust kitchen equipment so that they can expand the variety of the dishes they can cook. Yum Yum! The People’s Kitchen gang are also developing it as a fantastic event that can be replicated and scaled, because of course like the Awesome Foundation, this could work in any community. … read more →
Monsters general supplies, and now prints too! (oh yes and some creative writing workshops) We’re thrilled to give our November award to Lucy and Ben from the Ministry of Stories for their Monster Shop in Hoxton. Inspired by the pirate store at 826 Valencia in San Francisco, as well as offering the best in monster supplies, the store also does a line in creative writing workshops for children, and has lots of volunteers and authors contributing their time and energy to the project. Lucy and Ben applied for an AF award to print a run of very awesome screen prints of monsters done by some very fine illustrators in collaboration with local children who described their monsters to the illustrators. While the Ministry of stories have been able to secure funding for the educational side of their initiative, before the opening they found it difficult to find funding for the products they wanted to develop for the shop in order to make it self-sustaining from revenues from the shop. We were delighted to be able to contribute to this very awesome project!
“Oh my god, it’s full of stars” The Trustees of the Awesome Foundation’s London Chapter are delighted to announce the winner of their inaugural fellowship: Oscar Lhermite’s ‘Big Dipper Project‘. As our cities become increasingly populated, the man-made mix of pollution and light have all but banished the stars from our skies, eroding our magical relationship with these distant balls of white-hot plasma. ‘The Big Dipper Project’ is an attempt to recreate the constellations in the night sky over major cities using a combination of black helium balloons and white LEDs. Oscar, a French product designer and artist currently studying at the Royal College of Art in London, has been perfecting his technique by tethering his stars in a variety of configurations across the city. He aims to use the money to turbo-charge his efforts, bringing in bigger balloons, arduinos and advanced software to ensure precise star locations and minimal drift. This will culminate in a recreation of The Big Dipper somewhere over London later this Summer. (Photo by Cormac McGloin) The London Trustees were impressed with Oscar’s passion and enthusiasm for his ideas, and chose him for the May Fellowship because of this project’s general awesomeness, its connection with… read more →
AF-NYC’s Catherine White with AF-London’s Jane Ni Dhulchaointigh and James Carrigan Last week, AF-NYC micro-trustee Catherine White met with AF-London’s Jane Ni Dhulchaointigh and James Carrigan over a beer in Shoreditch to discuss transatlantic Awesomeness. Tonight Tomorrow (June 9, 2010) AF-London will be awarding their first grant with a party starting at 6.30 pm in The Griffin (93 Leonard Street). We’re really excited to hear who they pick. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pond, Awesome NYC are planning their 4th award party – details soon.
The newly formed London Chapter of the Awesome Foundation is kicking off proceedings today with a call for entries from London’s most creative, enterprising, fired up (and raring to go) minds. An awesome foundation chapter is a group of 10 micro-trustees in a local area. All 10 of us put £100 into a brown paper bag every month. Then we hand it over to the most awesome idea submitted. Got an awesome idea that needs £1,000 to become a reality? Hurrah! You’re in the right place. Submit your application here and we’ll invite the top applicants to present at our first event in June, where we will pick a worthy winner. No idea is too small, and it can be just about anything just as long as it follows the following 2 rules: 1. It’s awesome 2. The money has a meaningful impact on its realisation Important dates: May 4th Call for entries commences May 31st Deadline for May submissions June 9th Awesome event: presentations and award-giving (venue TBC) Let the awesomeness commence! Oh and you can read about the origins of the Awesome Foundation here