April showers got you down?  Re-energize with Awesome Kingston’s April Pitch Party and Awesome Hours!  Come out to the RCHA at 6:30PM on Thursday, 18 April and see what cool new ideas want a $1,000 microgrant to make our city even more awesome.  RSVP on the Facebook Event so we know how many people are going to be partying with us on the 18th!   Never been before? No worries! It’s really simple and rather informal. Every month, people apply to the Awesome Foundation for a microgrant. We select the ones that we think are the most awesome for the month and invite them to give an ‘elevator pitch’ to the audience, for which they have 90 seconds. Following that, they take 7 minutes of Q&A from the audience. Once all the pitches have presented, the ten trustees go and “scrum” – or, decide who walks away with the cash this month. It’s not only a free, fun, and inspiring event, it’s also a great place to meet and network with Kingstonians who are passionate about community and the continual improvement of our city. Invite your friends and come on out to the RCHA by 6:30PM to grab a drink and mingle before the pitches… read more →

The New York chapter is proud to announce that our April grant has been awarded to Nametag Day, which on June 1, 2013 will distribute 200,000-nametags around New York City. The purpose of the event is to get people to talk to each other. But more than that, it’s about bringing a culture of openness to this sometimes standoffish city. Read more on our April project page!  And don’t forget to follow Awesome NYC on Twitter and Facebook.

Sixteen-year-old music-enthusiast, photographer, and engineer-in-the-making Noah Klein attended Burning Man last year, which filled him with a need to participate and contribute to the odd and unique marriage of music and art for this year’s festival.  His answer: a reworking of Ruben’s Tube, a flaming cylinder that gives musical wavelengths a physical shape with fire (think: propane-fueled iTunes visualizer). To give it his own spin, Noah has rehashed this traditional construction by finding a discarded grand piano, digitizing its keys, and hooking the mechanism up to his own Ruben’s Tube.  His words: “I think it would be quite the spectacle to have someone be able to preform Mozart’s 5th Symphony and have it visualized with fire right in front of them.” Awesome LA, with the consent of Noah’s enthusiastic, patient, and trusting mom, have awarded Noah with an Awesome grant to foster young, analytically minds and add a spark to Burning Man 2013 . Flame on.

One in five Canadian moms struggle to provide clean diapers for their children. Kristina Prins has organized a city-wide diaper drive to address the need and bring awareness to the issue, and she has won Awesome Foundation – Calgary’s $1,000 no-strings-attached micro-grant for March 2013.

The Austin chapter of the Awesome Foundation is pleased to award our March $1000 cash grant to Jackie Garrett and her project, Have a Ball. Garrett is a lead crisis counselor with the Austin Police Department’s Victim Services Division, where she has worked for 14 years. The inspiration behind her Have a Ball project came from her work, where she, like many first responders, comes in regular contact with traumatized children who have either been victims of or witnesses to violent crimes such as domestic violence, sexual assault, suicide, and homicide which proves that you need not be discharged from the military, commit a crime or endure a crime to be a victim. The domestic violence lawyers have always said that children are the most affected group in domestic violence cases. If you ever experience or witness such crimes, it is best to find defense attorneys who will give you legal counseling and voice your interest. When called to a crime scene, Victim Services counselors often hand out teddy bears to these children, but, Garrett, a former soccer goalie at Baylor University, had a slightly different idea. She wanted to give kids soccer balls.  Not only does a shiny new… read more →