The Austin chapter of the Awesome Foundation is pleased to award our March $1000 cash grant to Jackie Garrett and her project, Have a Ball. Garrett is a lead crisis counselor with the Austin Police Department’s Victim Services Division, where she has worked for 14 years. The inspiration behind her Have a Ball project came from her work, where she, like many first responders, comes in regular contact with traumatized children who have either been victims of or witnesses to violent crimes such as domestic violence, sexual assault, suicide, and homicide which proves that you need not be discharged from the military, commit a crime or endure a crime to be a victim. The domestic violence lawyers have always said that children are the most affected group in domestic violence cases. If you ever experience or witness such crimes, it is best to find defense attorneys who will give you legal counseling and voice your interest. When called to a crime scene, Victim Services counselors often hand out teddy bears to these children, but, Garrett, a former soccer goalie at Baylor University, had a slightly different idea. She wanted to give kids soccer balls.  Not only does a shiny new… read more →

The Little Haiti Community Garden, our chapter’s February award winner, will be holding a benefit dinner on March 22 to draw attention to their transforming the garden. All members of the community are welcome! See the poster below for more information.

Art is good. Big Boats are great.  Big Art Boats are AWESOME. The Los Angeles Awesome Foundation is proud to award its February Awesome grant to LA-based artist Yaron Michael Hakim. With help from our $1,000 bucks –  and his own two hands – Hakim is building a 22-foot sailing vessel known as a proa, which he will sail 22 miles across the sea to Catalina Island in mid-March as part of his greater body of work focused on travel and life-journey.  Along his two-day trip, all by his lonesome, he’ll will be capturing stills and video that will be used later for an exhibit on April 25, 2013 at the University of California – Irvine. You can track the progress of this truly awesome live action art piece, check out unutea.wordpress.com/

It’s been a few weeks since we handed out our FIRST GRANT to the totally rad and ever-worthy Arthur Morgan for his project, Gather Baltimore. That picture to the right is the dashing Morgan getting his cool cash dough from Awesome Baltimore Trustee, Briony Hynson, and Guest Trustee, Dixon Stetler! Yippee!Our kick-ass trustee, Chloe Gallagher talked to the Gather Baltimore folks to gain some insight into how and why they do the work they do. Awesome Baltimore: How did the idea of Gather Baltimore originate? When did you decide that you needed to make it a reality? Gather Baltimore: The epiphany hit Arthur Morgan at the Farmers Market one Sunday morning. Just before noon, when the market was to end, vendors would begin throwing away food they could not sell. Morgan watched as hungry people rummaged through the discarded food, even picking up produce that had fallen on the ground. “I said, ‘Holy Moly! Look at all this food that is going to waste,’” Morgan says. So Morgan, himself an urban farmer, devised a way to salvage some of the scraps by collecting the food in bins and transporting it himself by pickup truck to Our Daily Bread, a nonprofit that serves daily meals… read more →

The New York chapter is proud to announce that our February grant has been awarded to local artist Bundith Phunsombatlert to fund his project “Wayfinding: 100 NYC Public Sculptures.” Bundith’s plan is to install graphic signposts showing the direction and distance of 100 pieces of public sculpture in eight parks scattered across New York’s five boroughs.  Tourists and locals alike will be guided by these signposts to take fuller advantage of New York’s wealth of existing public art — and the signposts will be a work of art themselves, in both a visual and participatory sense. Read more on our February project page!  And don’t forget to follow Awesome NYC on Twitter and Facebook.