We’re positively thrilled to announce today that the trustees of Awesome Foundation San Francisco have chosen Meredith Scheff to be this month’s Fellow for her project Scarf-a-Day, wherein she will make one silly, strange, whimsical, nerdy, electronic, fuzzy, warm, or otherwise totally awesome scarf a day for a whole month — and post how-tos online. Meredith’s a graduate of the California College of the Art’s Illustration program, though she’s been all over textiles, electronics, soft circuits, and a whole range of geekery in recent years. Specifically, she’s been sewing a ton recently, and it’s already led to a fair quantity of sheer epicness that we figured would be great to have manifested in a showcase of 30 awesome scarves. These will culminate in a mighty reception show sometime in January/February. So, stay tuned. You can find more about Meredith on her site and her Twitter. She’s also the creator of the Northskirt — a skirt that always helpfully indicates where due north is — which, if you haven’t seen yet, you really, really should. If you’d like to help support the Scarf-A-Day, check out Meredith’s Etsy, and you can donate to hear using the handy dandy PayPal button below: Congratulations… read more →

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 →

Greetings from California! I’m glad to officially announce that, after much deliberation, the September Fellowship of Awesome Foundation SF goes to the superbly fantastic project brewing over at Papergirl SF. The project clearly forwards the interest of awesomeness, and we couldn’t imagine a more perfect summer scheme to support! Dubbed a “a mail-art and delivery systems art project that is participatory, analogue, non-commercial, and impulsive,” Papergirl SF plans to broadly collect pieces of work mailed to them, and then distribute them in rolled bundles on bikes to random passerbys, old-school paperboy style. If you’re interested in participating and submitting artwork to be distributed, the deadline for submissions is September 18th (details on how to do that here). And, best of all, the Papergirl crew will be holding a showcase of all the work submitted on September 26th during the Mission Bicycle Festival at the Women’s Building. We’re definitely planning on being there, and hope you will be too! There’s more details available on their website here, for the curious. And a Facebook page, for those so inclined. Congratulations!

Congratulations to the July grant recipient Claire Schoen, who is creating a series of awesome audio tours about how climate change is affecting the San Francisco Bay. These tours will celebrate the biodiversity of the Bay while exploring the impact of sea level rise on coastal communities near the Bay and the human and natural life that depends on them. It will also explore what steps people are taking to address this shift. Claire Schoen is a media producer living in the Bay Area. Along with audio tours, Claire creates documentary-style radio programs for distribution on public stations nationwide and multimedia “webstories” for the Internet. Her media work has covered a wide range of subjects including nuclear proliferation, physical disability, communications technology and care-giving for the dying, as well as the environment. Claire uses sound to place listeners into a scene by employing verite storytelling and rich ambience beds. Check out www.claireschoenmedia.com to hear her past work.

The SF micro-trustees recently discussed what it means to be Awesome, and the types of projects we want to fund. We have received some truly AWESOME project proposals so far. We realize, however it would be helpful to articulate some guidelines to help future applicants write the best proposal possible.
It’s difficult to reach an easy opinion on what awesomeness means, and we didn’t agree on everything—which is probably a good thing. But we did come up with the following suggestions: You could be the most awesome person in the universe, and have the most awesome idea, but if you don’t tell us how $1,000 will be used or why it will make a big difference, we won’t fund you. A project that requires millions of dollars, or even several tens of thousands right now, is not a strong candidate for a $1k micro grant. Even if it’s a great project, it won’t get funded if we don’t think the grant will move your project forward in a significant way. We would much rather fund a project where $1,000 is the difference between yes and no. (That being said, we like people who think big, so if a $1,000 is an… read more →