It gives us great pleasure to announce the first award for the Awesome Foundation DC grant is (drum roll please): Fab Lab DC. After reviewing over 70 applications and with much passionate discussion, our board came to a completely unanimous agreement for the winner of the first Awesome Foundation DC grant. So what is this Fab Lab and why is it AWESOME? Phyllis Klein, the powerhouse behind the application, is currently operating a mobile Fab Lab over on 14th St. The Awesome Foundation grant is going to help her activate their new bricks and mortar space on North Capitol Street, NW. Here’s her proposal for an awesome grant: In the spirit of MIT’s Fab Lab community outreach project, Fab Lab DC will create a high-tech, fabrication laboratory/community workshop in the heart of the Nation’s Capital to advance creativity, innovation, and collaborative projects. Fab Lab DC will serve and foster the creative community by providing access to digital fabrication technology, rapid prototyping, and the global Fab Lab network. Fab Labs enable people to use technology to create, experiment and produce, shifting the paradigm away from people merely “consuming” technology toward using technology to create solutions. With a focus on life-long learning… read more →
Awesome Foundation Boston is thrilled to announce our October Fellow, Tim Soo and his Invisible Instruments project! Tim amazed us with this video of an invisible violin he cooked up at school when he had forgotten to bring his real violin to practice. How cool is that? Make sure to watch the video through to when he starts playing. Tim will use the grant funds to buy the equipment he needs to build more instrument prototypes and post instructions for how he’s done it. He’s already gone on to build an invisible guitar as part of Music Hack Day Boston with an iPod Touch. Stay tuned for a fellowship awards party where we hope to see more of Tim’s work.
It is with great pleasure that we announce that the Awesome Foundation DC is open for business and ready to uphold your rights to awesomeness from the nations capital. The board of the Awesome Foundation DC is staffed by some of the districts most committed civic innovators, ready to help turn your dreams of awesomeness into reality, $1000 at a time. The Awesome Foundation DC is (L-R): Mark Drapeau / @Cheeky_Geeky, Shana Glickfield / @Dcconcierge, Frank Tobia / @Ftobes, Erica Williams / @Ericawilliamsdc, Philippa Hughes / @Pinklineproject, Garlin Gilcrist II / @Garlin, Charlie Bengel Jr, Peter Corbett / @Corbett3000, Eric Mill / @Klondike, Alexander Howard / @Digiphile, Bonnie Shaw /@Bon_Zai (Dean of Awesome + contact for queries) Each month (starting now!) we will award $1000 cash to a project that promotes awesomeness in the District and surrounds. Your idea/innovation/project can be sublime or ridiculous (or sublimely ridiculous!) as long as it meets the following criteria: 1. It’s awesome. 2. It’s got impact. 3. It’s going to happen soon. First round submissions close midnight Tues 30 November. To enter, complete the Washington DC application form here. For further inspiration, read more about the origins of Awesome here and check out what… read more →
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 →