Stay tuned …… www.awesomeatlanta.org

Awesome Palm Beach is having our very first Pitch Party and Grant Award on Thursday December 5th in West Palm Beach, FL. RSVP NOW AT:  http://www.meetup.com/Awesome-Palm-Beach/events/143440282/ We make small, no strings attached, micro-genius grants for flashes of micro-brilliance and awesomeness in Palm Beach County. We invite ANYONE with $100 and the desire to support Awesomeness in Palm Beach to join us and help to select and crowdfund the winner for our first ever grant! Pitches by finalists will be followed by a short vote of attendees  and then the award of the microgrant! This will be followed by Awesome Hours around 8:30 pm which is a great time to network with other great people who think Palm Beach is awesome and want to make it ever more awesome. Trustees will be around too so feel free to ask us questions and chat with us. All money collected will be donated to the winner selected that that night! —– Have a crazy brilliant idea that needs funding? We award a minimum  $1,000 grant every month to awesome projects and people in Palm Beach County. It couldn’t be simpler! Your idea is yours alone. We don’t want a stake in it. We… read more →

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!

The following is a guest post, written by Chris Rawlins from The Scholar Match— The consistently rising cost of higher education has left many bright and high-achieving high school students in the Bay Area without the financial resources to attain their goals, dreams, and ambitions of a college degree.  As a result, I have partnered with other Silicon Valley professionals in starting a new financial scholarship fund through the combined organizations of Indiegogo.com and ScholarMatch. Our goal is simple.  To provide college scholarships for 12 very special and deserving students in the Bay area.  This program will also be offering more than just financial assistance.  We will follow these young adults through their college years, providing support and mentoring as they face the many challenges of a post-secondary education. We need your help.  The 12 scholarships will require a combined total of only $16,150 dollars.  We can easily meet this goal with only 646 donations of only $25.  It is our hope that the wide reaching arms of the social media will help our Indiegogo Campaign to quickly “GO VIRAL”.  All funds exceeding the original $16,150 will be used to help even more students from the California, Bay Area area…. read more →

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has announced a $20,000 grant to support and expand the grant-giving capacity of the Awesome Foundation Miami chapter. For more details, please see the press release or visit the grant page. Since awarding our first grant in January (a meditation program for high school students), we have received hundreds of proposals. Applicants have spanned every geographic area of Greater Miami.  They’ve come from a diverse group of applicants: from students to artists, business professionals to residents of homeless shelters. As a consequence, we’ve been fortunate to fund a range of awesome and uniquely Miami ideas such as surfing classes for kids, a community garden in Little Haiti and a mural display by local artists in Wynwood. We’ve also learned that $1,000 a month, while it provides enough to kick-start many projects, doesn’t go very far when you have so many applicants. Multiple times, instead of awarding a grant, we’ve brainstormed how to connect an applicant with someone who is working on complementary projects or an organization that might fund the idea. We hope to foster more of these connections that might not happen otherwise. Thanks to Knight’s support, we will continue to fund great ideas and build connections across our city through social… read more →