On Tuesday, May 14th AwesomeNYC announced our May Grantee at an Awesome Party at Culturefix on the Lower East Side. We threw the party with Gwen Li (aka Gracie Jin), a friend of Awesome who did a reading from her debut novel The Switch Sisters! Along with the grant announcement, we had live music, nametags from our April grantee Nametag Day (who tilted their Crowdtilt campaign this week!), and a grant update from our October Grantee, Dave Adams from the Acoustic Guitar project. Dave just got back from filming in Haiti and had some stories and footage to share. After all the updates and book reading, we asked Gracie to announce our May Grant, which went to the Bronx Documentary Center for their Movies at Sundown series. The Bronx is home to 1.4 million people and there are only 4 movie theaters, none of which show documentary films. May’s Awesome Grant will help the expand the Movies at Sundown program, which is an incredibly meaningful community resource in an underserved area. For more information on the Bronx Documentary Center and Movies at Sundown, check out the project page here!

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 →

The Austin Awesome Foundation is proud to be a part of the fourth-annual QueerBomb, the winner of our latest $1000 grant.   The QueerBomb Manifesto explains the inspiration behind the event and the movement it represents: QueerBomb is a family of LGBTQIA individuals gathering to support our unique and collective pride. Our purpose is to provide a space to celebrate each and every member of our community and encourage all to embrace the manifold ways we contribute to building a beautiful and diverse society. We reclaim the radical, carnal and transgressive lineage of our ever-changing community in our ongoing fight for equal justice and the right to express ourselves in whatever way we see fit. Each June, the month of Stonewall, we stand together to embrace our sexuality, bodies, personalities, art, music, literature and politics, while recapturing pride from corporate sponsorship. We strive for a pride that refuses to put rules on what you can and can’t be proud of, that says every expression, from the spirit to the flesh, is worthy. QueerBomb does not apologize. QueerBomb does not make excuses. QueerBomb is free for all. QueerBomb stands proud, and so should you. Writes organizer Beth Schindler, “We have definitely… read more →

Small Projects, Big Impact Some creative projects require years of planning, large staffs, and extensive fundraising campaigns. Others don’t – but that doesn’t mean that smaller projects are easy to accomplish or that they are any less important. On March 2, 2013, John Carnwath and Derek Sherman of The Chicago Awesome Foundation sat down with Janet Attarian (Chicago Department of Transportation), Katherine Darnstadt (Latent Design / Architecture for Humanity Chicago), and Lindsay Obermeyer (The Red Thread Project®) at the Creative Chicago Expo to discuss Small Projects and Big Impacts. An audio recording of the discussion is now available online. The panelists discuss small-scale projects of various sorts – “small” being defined variously in terms of physical dimension, budget size, duration, or institutional establishment – asking why people do them, how they get funded, what challenges to expect, and what their impact is.

In July of 2013, a group of art graduates called WHALE is returning to the northernmost parts of Manitoba to continue their adventures with Canada’s beluga whales. Their project: Becoming Beluga, to create a suit of wearable artwork that resembles a beluga and allows the wearer to don the whale’s appearance. Can a human be accepted into the pod? Can we break the barriers of communication? WHALE will construct the suit using underwater cameras, a speaker on the top of the head, and hydrophones for ears, among other things. The experience can be recorded for later. AF Winnipeg is excited to award WHALE $1000 for their April grant, and look forward to hearing all about their adventures come summer.