The Austin Awesome Foundation’s June $1000 grant goes to a talented team of Austin high school students, Joshua Stricker and Marek Travnikar. Both Josh and Marek are members of their school’s robotics team, which is how they got the idea for their project: a Control Moment Gyroscope (CMG). We’ll let Josh and Marek explain what that means:   A CMG uses the angular momentum of a high speed flywheel to effect the movement of the object that the gyroscope is mounted to. The most common application of CMGs is in satellites, such as the international space station, where they are used for navigation and maneuvering. Our design is obviously on a much smaller scale. our goal is to be able to perform wheelies, somersaults, rolls and other maneuvers on a 120-pound robot solely using the CMG.   The way we would accomplish this is relatively simple. A 30-pound flywheel is spun up to and kept spinning at 6000rpm by two powerful Cim motors. This assembly is mounted on two gimbals which can each be rotated 360 degrees, applying a torque to the flywheel. This rotation is accomplished with two more Cims, one per gimbal, each with a three stage planetary gearbox… read more →

Awesome Foundation MIAMI is thrilled to announce a collaboration with WhereBy.Us, a local Miami collaborative formed to create and do small, achievable civic projects together that make Miami a better place to live! The two organizations came together to host an pannel discussion and working session to address the issue of “How to create a more vibrant Downtown Miami?” Multiple working groups pitched their ideas to the gathered audience and three finalists were selected, all intent on creating innovative avenues for more engagement and activity in Miami’s Downtown. The three finalists will now have a month to construct more specific plans for their ideas and present them in more detail to the Awesome Foundation MIAMI. In turn, we will give an additional monthly grant to our favorite idea. To see photos of this fantastic collaboration, see our Facebook album!

It’s pretty awesome when a group of neighbours come together and take back their neighbourhood.  That’s what happened when Vicki Garland and her neighbours at Kathleen Ave. and Walnut St. in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada, joined together to form the Parents Standing Together Tenants Association.  The group is celebrating their 5th anniversary and what a perfect way to celebrate by having a parking lot dance social where the whole community can come together and celebrate.  Food, music, dance contests, lawn games, hula hoop contest = AWESOME!  The Awesome Foundation is stoked to support a group who are so involved in keeping their community a happy and safe place to live. https://kronansapotekse.com

On Tuesday, May 14th AwesomeNYC announced our May Grantee at an Awesome Party at Culturefix on the Lower East Side. We threw the party with Gwen Li (aka Gracie Jin), a friend of Awesome who did a reading from her debut novel The Switch Sisters! Along with the grant announcement, we had live music, nametags from our April grantee Nametag Day (who tilted their Crowdtilt campaign this week!), and a grant update from our October Grantee, Dave Adams from the Acoustic Guitar project. Dave just got back from filming in Haiti and had some stories and footage to share. After all the updates and book reading, we asked Gracie to announce our May Grant, which went to the Bronx Documentary Center for their Movies at Sundown series. The Bronx is home to 1.4 million people and there are only 4 movie theaters, none of which show documentary films. May’s Awesome Grant will help the expand the Movies at Sundown program, which is an incredibly meaningful community resource in an underserved area. For more information on the Bronx Documentary Center and Movies at Sundown, check out the project page here!

The following is an interview with San Francisco’s April 2013 grantee, Hunter Franks, about his SF Postcard Project. The SF Postcard Project encourages community connection through storytelling exchange. 1) Participants in marginalized neighborhoods fill out a postcard with a positive personal story of their community. 2) Postcard is mailed to a random San Francisco resident to initiate stronger connections between people and communities. How did it come about? Hunter: While I was working for the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation, I had the opportunity to work with youth in the marginalized Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco. Bayview is tucked into an isolated Southeast corner of San Francisco. Most San Franciscans don’t have a reason to go there. They only know what they see on the news: violence, drugs, and poverty. But, there is much more to these communities — stories that the larger population never sees or hears about. The youth I worked with wanted to tell these stories to the rest of the city. They wanted to change people’s perception of Bayview and they wanted to attract people to the positive stories and places in Bayview. Perception and behavior change are not easy things to accomplish, so I set out… read more →