Have you ever planted a seed in soil and returned five years later?If you have, you’ll know the potential of one tiny seed and the impact it can have on a community.Luckily, long-time Girl Scout Lori from Back To Natives has a commitment to bringing trees to our concrete city.Her goal is to enable youth to lend a hand in community conservation.Through Back To Native’s habitat restoration program, she plans to take a group of interns and volunteers on a seed collection trip to the National Forest.They will return with the seeds and plant them in our local Los Angeles wildlands. https://hrvatskaedfarmacija.com Date for next seed collection trip: September 23. Meet at Back to Native’s Nursery at 7AM and head over to Silverado Canyon and up Maple Springs Road.Return by 3PM.If you’re interested, please email: volunteer@backtonatives.org.Address: Back to Natives Nursery at Santiago Park600 E Memory LaneSanta Ana Ca, 92705

  Did you know that at the end of the school semester, college students might have hundreds of pre-paid meal points (or “swipes” on their meal cards) that disappear at the end of each term?  Neither did we, until Awesome LA learned about ‘Swipes for the Homeless’, our March grant winner, who told us about their program that allows students to convert the unused dollars to food for their local homeless populations.  In addition to feeding the homeless, the organization also educates students on campus about local homelessness and hunger issues in their area.  We thought that sounded awesome. ‘Swipes for the Homeless’ was originally created at UCLA in 2009 to address the hundreds of thousands of dollars that disappeared from student meal plans every semester, and by 2012, the organization became an incorporated non-profit to help the program spread nationally.  They’re no up to five, student-run chapters, headquartered at The Hub LA in Downtown.  Here’s hoping their Awesome grant helps them develop more chapters across LA and beyond. Learn more at swipesforthehomeless.org.

Twelve-year-old Riley started Rainbow Pack at the ripe age of ten, after noticing a severe lack of basic supplies at a local Los Angeles elementary school.  In hopes to remedy what she considered basic student needs, Riley raised money to supply low-income schools with backpacks filled with educational staples: pencils, erasers, crayons, folders, pens, bookmarks, etc.  The organization has since been called “Rainbow Pack,” which officially is  “dedicated to providing homework supplies to students in need.”   This past August, Rainbow Packs provided over 2,000 backpacks containing these supplies, nearly doubling the success of its previous year. Now, as the project grows, Riley and her team of parents and colleagues have set out to distribute at least 4,000 backpacks to elementary schools in the Los Angeles area. Visit the Rainbow Pack website at http://www.rainbowpack.org/

This month the Awesome Foundation Los Angeles funded an proposal from within! The idea that came from our group of trustees and got put into action this month is a food sharing project called Share Shelf. We built 25 small square shelves that fasten (without doing harm) to parking-sign posts or bus-stop sign posts. The shelves have bumper stickers on them with instructions on how to share your leftovers that say: FULL? SHARE YOUR LEFTOVERS! HUNGRY? HELP YOURSELF. The shelves are located all around the city near restaurants that serve big portions that are in areas with heavy foot traffic and that have a high volume of homelessness. The shelves are not TOO near restaurants to prevent loitering near entrances.This is because we want the shelves to be a positive thing for the whole community, including dining establishments!

Sixteen-year-old music-enthusiast, photographer, and engineer-in-the-making Noah Klein attended Burning Man last year, which filled him with a need to participate and contribute to the odd and unique marriage of music and art for this year’s festival.  His answer: a reworking of Ruben’s Tube, a flaming cylinder that gives musical wavelengths a physical shape with fire (think: propane-fueled iTunes visualizer). To give it his own spin, Noah has rehashed this traditional construction by finding a discarded grand piano, digitizing its keys, and hooking the mechanism up to his own Ruben’s Tube.  His words: “I think it would be quite the spectacle to have someone be able to preform Mozart’s 5th Symphony and have it visualized with fire right in front of them.” Awesome LA, with the consent of Noah’s enthusiastic, patient, and trusting mom, have awarded Noah with an Awesome grant to foster young, analytically minds and add a spark to Burning Man 2013 . Flame on.