Mark your calendars: on Thursday, 15 November, is Awesome Kingston’s One-Year-Anniversary Public Pitch Party night!  We’re starting off at 6:30PM in the St. Lawrence Ballroom Salon B of the Residence Inn Marriott at 7 Earl St.  Please RSVP here right away – and invite your friends and family!   Awesome Kingston has been around for a full year in the Limestone City, having held its inaugural pitch party in November 2011.  Since then, we’ve funded some great projects geared toward making Kingston even more awesome – and we’re really excited about the line-up of pitches for this month.  By the end of the night, we will have given away $10,000 in no-strings-attached microgrants to these local projects.  Everyone’s invited to attend, listen, participate, and enjoy! This will also be our last pitch party for 2012, since we do not hold one in December (although we will have Awesome Hours), but start marking every third Thursday in your calendars for 2013, since we’ll be continuing full throttle in January!  You’re not going to want to miss this night of fun, innovation, inspiration, and engagement. Remember to follow us on Twitter and Like our Facebook Page to stay in touch; if you’re not the social media addict type, just subscribe… read more →

Awesome Foundation – Calgary goes retro, lumberjack style, as we’re pleased to announce that Karilynn Thompson is our $1,000 micro-grant recipient for the month of October with “The 2nd Annual Log Driver’s Waltz: A Plaid Party!”

Solving the world’s beer storage problem. Last night Awesome Squared got together at Claremont Tonic in South Yarra (go there – real good), to eat all the Asian food and hear Andrew tell us his best pick-up line to date. We won’t spoil it for you, but maybe you’ll be lucky enough to hear it from the man himself. This month’s grant when to a simple but clever idea that will hopefully soon become a household name. The Beer End. “It’s like a bookend for your beer.” You should get the general gist. It’s a problem that most of us face, every day: Stacking beer or wine bottles in the fridge, without them rolling about or taking up too much space. We all like to have beer – or cruisers (ew) or whatever in the fridge for when friends come round. So now we can have more and they won’t move about. Good one, Zac Martin. The money will go towards enlisting an industrial designer to make the first prototype.  

It has been a busy couple of months for Awesome Mongolia! First, Aldarmaa and I had an amazing time representing the Awesome Foundation by speaking at TEDx Ulaanbaatar about Awesome Mongolia, as well as another project we have been working on, the Good Father Project. You can catch the video here– and practice your Mongolian during the second half of the video, subtitles are forthcoming! The idea was well received by the audience and we are currently working with a group from Ulaanbaatar, the capital city, to start our second chapter (and potentially third) of Awesome Mongolia! The deans of the new group are going to work with students at the health sciences university, and hope to fund some great public health projects. We can’t wait to see what they come up with! Finally, we awarded our second project for Awesome Sukhbaatar in late October. The winning proposal was submitted by an entire class of 11th grade students at one of our schools. They will be working with the local municipal library to recover books that are severely damaged. The students also plan on starting a competition based on reading books!

The National Marrow Donor Program really really really needs more minorities (who are harder to match) and more young people (whose cells make for more successful transplants) to register as potential bone marrow donors. BE THE MATCH ON CAMPUS is their push to make this happen, at 35 colleges and universities in SoCal – including UCLA on 10/24. Besides having to convince college students that it’s really NOT as scary as you think to be a donor, BE THE MATCH also has to pay for testing all these guys – and it’s not cheap. So the LA chapter of The Awesome Foundation is giving this month’s 1K awesome grant to BE THE MATCH ON CAMPUS to pay for 40 UCLA students to be put on the national registry — and hopefully be the match for the someone who needs it. xoxo The Awesome Foundation