Are you in SoCal with an awesome idea and need a $1,000 to make it happen? The fresh-out-of-the-oven LA chapter of the Awesome Foundation is here to help! We are a group of awesome-loving Angelinos who, once a month, will each put $100 in a brown paper bag and give the collective $1,000 to someone doing something awesome. For real. No strings attached. Your idea/project/passion can be creative, important, ridiculous, or rad – or all four – just as long as: it’s awesome. it’s local (OK, local-ish. OK, just somehow connected to LA). it’s at the tipping point, and could really use a thousand bucks to push it over the edge to reality. The first deadline is November 15 — fill out the supersimple Awesome Grant application, and read more about the origin of the Awesome Foundation. And follow us here and here. This is it, Los Angeles. We’re on the roof projecting our Awesome signal into the night sky. We just hope Awesome sees it…

Teenage Awesome Alert! For October, the Awesome Foundation (SF) is doing something different. We are awarding a dual grant for two projects that encourages teenage boys and girls to use their wits and bodies to work with the elements. Hoods to the Woods started as a bootstrap project by Anthony Carranza to get boys living in the Western Addition neighborhood out of the city and onto the slopes a few hours west of San Francisco. Some boys had never traveled further than the Bay Area before, and had never experienced snow. With a $1,000 Awesome Foundation Grant, Anthony hopes to organize another trip this winter. Check ’em out on Facebook. “My Life: The Video Game” is a 12-week workshop that will “will teach teenage girls to design, program, and produce their own video games along with splitgate hacks based on situations, systems, or relationships in their own lives. Using the visual programming software Scratch, students will learn to create all aspects of their game including the artwork, sound, and programming.” How awesome is that?  It is organized by Oasis for Girls, which is a well-established  “multidisciplinary arts- and youth-development after-school program providing direct services to low-income, immigrant and girls of… read more →

This Monday, the Awesome Foundation NYC held our end-of-summer party at Tribeca Tavern, where we celebrated our recent grantees: Sub Base One by Lee Von Kraus and the Hip Hop Word Count by Tahir Hemphill. Thanks to everyone for coming out and thanks to Grolsch Grants for the free beer!

Monday, September 13, at 7:30pm Tribeca Tavern 247 West Broadway (at Beach St) RSVP Now on Facebook

Greetings from California! I’m glad to officially announce that, after much deliberation, the September Fellowship of Awesome Foundation SF goes to the superbly fantastic project brewing over at Papergirl SF. The project clearly forwards the interest of awesomeness, and we couldn’t imagine a more perfect summer scheme to support! Dubbed a “a mail-art and delivery systems art project that is participatory, analogue, non-commercial, and impulsive,” Papergirl SF plans to broadly collect pieces of work mailed to them, and then distribute them in rolled bundles on bikes to random passerbys, old-school paperboy style. If you’re interested in participating and submitting artwork to be distributed, the deadline for submissions is September 18th (details on how to do that here). And, best of all, the Papergirl crew will be holding a showcase of all the work submitted on September 26th during the Mission Bicycle Festival at the Women’s Building. We’re definitely planning on being there, and hope you will be too! There’s more details available on their website here, for the curious. And a Facebook page, for those so inclined. Congratulations!