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 following is an interview with San Francisco’s April 2013 grantee, Hunter Franks, about his SF Postcard Project. The SF Postcard Project encourages community connection through storytelling exchange. 1) Participants in marginalized neighborhoods fill out a postcard with a positive personal story of their community. 2) Postcard is mailed to a random San Francisco resident to initiate stronger connections between people and communities. How did it come about? Hunter: While I was working for the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation, I had the opportunity to work with youth in the marginalized Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco. Bayview is tucked into an isolated Southeast corner of San Francisco. Most San Franciscans don’t have a reason to go there. They only know what they see on the news: violence, drugs, and poverty. But, there is much more to these communities — stories that the larger population never sees or hears about. The youth I worked with wanted to tell these stories to the rest of the city. They wanted to change people’s perception of Bayview and they wanted to attract people to the positive stories and places in Bayview. Perception and behavior change are not easy things to accomplish, so I set out… read more →

Whew! Been awhile since we posted up here. Tim Hwang reporting live from Awesome Foundation San Francisco. We’re thrilled to announce today that we’ve officially awarded September fellowships to not one, but two projects of a great deal of awesomeness. Both are performances, and both coming up in the next month or so. First, huge congratulations to Julie Crossman and her posse of Excellence for her project The Golden Hour, a brand-new branch of the wildly successful series of live late night talk shows Oakland Nights Live (and the obligatory Facebook page). The show will be held the third Saturday of every month in a venue to be determined in San Francisco — past performances have included skits, performances, interviews and Julie’s dad. So, we’re basically very much pumped for the whole thing – it’s looking like the first show will be sometime in mid-September. Our second award goes to Mike Lai and his proposal for a Sonic Kung Fu Battle. Which is…sort of tough to explain. But when you see the video, you’ll understand why we funded them. They’re planning on performing a substantially scaled up live version of their voice-powered sound effect street battle performance for the ZERO1 Biennial happening Sept 14-16th. Congratulations to… read more →

We’ve been quiet here at Awesome Foundation San Francisco for a little bit, but excited to say that we’re back this month with a duo of amazing projects that we’re thrilled to be a part of. One is a dance party, another is a game festival. Presenting… 1) The Balloon Powered Dance Party George, Will, and Issac are these three guys that we met recently who in their free time have been launching various items into the stratosphere using hundreds of helium balloons (see, e.g. a Christmas tree). They’ve teamed up with the good people over at the Million Fishes Art Collective in the Mission to do an installation that will fill their massive 22,000 cubic feet gallery floor to ceiling with balloons. We’re funding them to do as much. This alone would be probably awesome enough to warrant an Awesome Foundation grant, but the added twist is that they’ve been playing around with little radio receiver/speaker/LED units that will fit inside a few hundred of these balloons, allowing them to broadcast some bumpin’ tunes and shine a weirdo ethereal light through the morass of inflated elastic that people will be allowed to wander through. The results, we expect, will… read more →

Hello everyone! It’s official: the trustees of Awesome Foundation San Francisco are extremely proud this month to make an award to Erin Bregman of the Little Opera Company. Erin’s project is simple, but awesome. She works with children between 2nd and 5th grade at the West Portal Elementary School to write, produce, and perform complete operas. That’s singing and dancing. Since they come out of the collective minds of the kids that Erin works with, the topics of these operas are unbelievably intense: previous works have included operas about evil ponies on Mars, pirates, and Custer’s Last Stand (see video above). Naturally, we’re all about this, so AF-SF is helping to fund their upcoming production in March. We’ll post more details as they come together – but from what Erin tells us, the performance is set to include wild animals, magical moons, and spooky forests, so it pretty much is going to be awesome. Also: they’re looking for people to lend a hand! If you know of a small performance space that might be a good place for it – be sure to drop us a line at contact@awesomefoundation.org. Also, if you’re interested in donating to these efforts, the Little… read more →