Found Awesome.

FYI: Ottawa is Awesome too.

In very exciting news, I found out today (well, actually I found out last week, but it was officially announced today) that I’ve received the November Awesome Ottawa grant from the Awesome Foundation for Hello Ottawa!

The Awesome Ottawa Foundation consists of a group of 10 trustees from a variety of sectors who donate some of their own money each month to fund a local project. It’s a really great model.

I applied for the grant to help out with transcription services for Hello Ottawa, since transcribing interviews takes up a large amount of my time and is the main reason the waiting list to participate is so long. Huge, huge thanks to Awesome Ottawa for making me their November Fellow.

1 year ago

FYI - Sydney is Awesome.

tumbletogether:

I consider myself very lucky to be part of the Awesome Foundation in Sydney. I get to hang out with really inspiring fellow members, be part of a global movement, and most importantly, I get to learn about and help the most awesome projects and people on a monthly basis.

Still one of my favourite grant recipients is Scott Brown, and the video above is of his project, Experiential Media & Autistic Spectrum Disorders. In Scott’s words:

I am an Honours student at COFA in Sydney, studying Digital Media and focusing on interactive and experiential design. Currently, I am working on a year-long project which will look at how children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs) respond to physical interaction with digital devices.

You can read all about this amazing device over at Scott’s excellent website, Kodama.Pixel.

It’s great to see that Scott’s project has moved on and that the $1,000 is helping him to refine his idea and progress it into a more sophisticated working prototype.

Just confirms what we already knew - Scott is awesome and so is his project.

1 year ago

2011: an AWESOME year in Awesome

awesomestudies:

Awesome Announcements

Awesome Chicago’s November grant goes to Felix Jung for his QR Code Poetry project.

Awesome Seattle’s first grantee has released her first story-for-a-sandwich, entitled “You Could be Happy”.

Awesome Connecticut is now in business! Welcome aboard!

Awesome Pittsburgh had their first event on December 5th and gave out two grants to Puppet Photobooth and Pop-up Co-op (very alliterative). Instead of giant checks, they handed out microchecks for the microgrants. AWESOME!

Awesome Montreal’s first grant went to the Alley Kids project.

More information about Awesome Melbourne’s October grant, the Positive Parks Project!

Awesome Food’s November grant goes to SNAP Gardens, a program that promotes buying seeds with food stamps for food security.

Every superhero needs a supervillain. Ours, the Awful Foundation, has just reared its ugly head! Whatever shall we do?

Awesome Events

Awesome Calgary’s cohosting a holiday party tonight. How do you guys have so many events??

Awesome in the News

Awesome Ottawa’s November grant to Anne Patterson gets written up.

Awesome Tampa Bay gets a detailed writeup of their first grant to the Birdhouse Buying Club.

Awesome Foundation receives a positive review in Free Money Ate my Brain, a site that normally warns about the dangers of getting free money.

Awesome Seattle’s Ellen Chisa writes about how she got over her skepticism to give $100/month.

Reading

Lower-income women give more, proportionally, than any other demographic.

1 year ago

Awesome Wrap-Up: November 1-8, 2011

This is a new experiment in consolidating all the great news we get on a week to week basis in the Awesome universe. If I missed something, send me a note! Likewise, would love to hear what you all are reading that’s relevant to the Awesome Foundation.

Awesome Announcements

An AF Boston-backed Kickstarter project to create Biochemies (magnetic DNA molecule plush dolls) is up and running!
Awesome Chicago’s October grant is making science cheaper with an Open Source Scanning Tunneling Microscope project.
Awesome NYC’s October grant goes to Bushwick City Farms, a network of open spaces run by neighborhood volunteers that provides free food, clothing and educational programs for the community.
AF Sydney reveals that they gave their June grant to surfer Chris Anderson to prototype a more environmentally-friendly surfboard.
AF-SF interviews Awesome Fellow Kristina Kearns, the creator of Ourshelves, a more intimate public space for reading.
Christina Xu of IHAS/AF-Boston is giving a (free) (comes with lunch) talk about Awesomeness at the Center for Civic Media at MIT.

Awesome in the News

“Every once in a while, I come across something that leads me to believe that humankind is going to survive the current malaise and meshugas.” - The Pink Slip reacts to AF-Boston’s Boston Globe article.
Awesome Foundation Calgary is namechecked in this Calgary Herald piece about visionary philanthropists helped make the city a “cultural capital”.
CreatEquity summarizes Awesome Foundation founder Tim Hwang’s talk at the Grantmakers in the Arts conference.
“All of the members are really excited that we can help unleash the altruistic creativity of the city.” - La Fondation Formidable Montreal is covered in the Montreal Gazette.
Awesome Foundation Grand Rapids’ first grant, a youth writing center, is written up in the Grand Rapids Press.
Watch this great Global TV news story on Awesome Foundation Toronto and their insidious plans to shake up municipal law, one guerilla fish taco stand at a time.
“Any leftover cash will be spent on mini-apple grinders and juices to make cider and fruit trees to plant in public places that could be tapped for future picks.” - Creative Loafing Atlanta on urban fruit scavengers Concrete Jungle, Awesome Food’s latest fellow.
Awesome Kingston (Ontario) gets their deadline reminder into the Whig.

and, in a super epic move,

Awesome Foundation founder Tim Hwang is featured as one of 12 innovative philanthropists in the Globe and Mail, alongside Bill Gates, George Soros, and Bono.

What We’re Reading

Stop Blaming the Stars - Panthea Lee of the Reboot’s great talk on the man-made nature of disasters and how to design effective recoveries.
Money Pools Float Immigrant Dreams - on informal immigrant money pools that enable small business and creative projects.
Without Community We Are Nothing - WDET’s excellent piece on why they started their “Crossing the Lines” series, showcasing opportunities to cross difficult boundaries in Detroit.

via awesomestudies

1 year ago

New from Jonathan Harris, Balloons of Bhutan.

“It involved handing out balloons to 117 people, talking to them about happiness, asking them to make a wish, and then stringing up the wishes in a mountain pass…”

via chrysaora of @awesomebos

(Source: sorayaelizabethdarabi)

1 year ago

Check the swag for Anywhere Organ kickstarter donors: pipe organ brass knuckles!!! 25 days left to get yours. Tic-toc-tic-toc… http://kck.st/anywhereorgan

via anywhereorgan (Awesome NYC Fellow)
Video credits: @willowbl00 + Livingston Lancer Robotics Team #3415

1 year ago

Chicago October Fellow Revealed!

Let’s say you’re an average Joe evil genius trying to make a sentient nano-swarm in your underground lair. How do you see the little guys to prove you’ve succeeded …or troubleshoot in the unlikely case of failure? Traditionally, you’d need a $30,000 microscope to accomplish that task.

Enter the Chicago Awesome Foundation’s October grantee, Sacha De’Angeli, and his Open Source Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) project: a project whose goals are to produce an easy to assemble digital scanning-tunneling microscope, with well documented software and hardware designs, for a complete cost of $1000.

For those of you who are not up to date on the latest in evil genius basement technology, Wikipedia explains:

“A scanning tunneling microscope (STM) is an instrument for imaging surfaces at the atomic level. Its development in 1981 earned its inventors, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer (at IBM Zürich), the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. For an STM, good resolution is considered to be 0.1 nm lateral resolution and 0.01 nm depth resolution. With this resolution, individual atoms within materials are routinely imaged and manipulated.”

Since both the software and the hardware designs for the microscope with be made available to the public, any high school science club with $1000 will be able to replicate Sacha’s microscope. Now if that isn’t awesome, we don’t know what is!

So there you have it, the chicagoawesome October grantee: Sacha De’Angeli.

(via awesomechicago)

1 year ago

Cancer is NOT awesome, but getting tested to become a bone marrow donor is OFF-THE-CHARTS AWESOME. @awesomesfo trustee Amit Gupta has acute leukemia and needs a marrow transplant. Those of South Asian descent would be especially helpful.

Spread the word. Save a life.

superamit:

Two weeks ago I got a call from my doctor, who I’d gone to see the day before because I’d been feeling worn out and was losing weight, and wasn’t sure why.

He was brief: “Amit, you’ve got Acute Leukemia. You need to enter treatment right away.”

I was terrified. I packed a backpack full of clothes, went to the hospital as he’d instructed, and had transfusions through the night to allow me to take a flight home at 7am the next day. I Googled acute leukemia as I lay in my hospital bed, learning that if it hadn’t been caught, I’d have died within weeks.

—

I have a couple more months of chemo to go, then the next step is a bone marrow transplant. As Jay and Tony describe below, minorities are severely underrepresented in the bone marrow pool, and I need help.

A few ways to help:

If you’re South Asian, get a free test by mail. You rub your cheeks with a cotton swab and mail it back. It’s easy.

If you’re in NYC, you can go to this event my friends are putting on.

If you know any South Asians (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, or Sri Lanka), please point ‘em to the links above.

*NEW* Organize a donor drive near you (the most helpful thing you could possibly do!) email 100kcheecks@gmail.com. They’ll send you kits, flyers, tell you what to say, and make the whole process easy cheesy.

jayparkinsonmd:

My friend Amit Gupta founded my favorite photography site Photojojo. A few weeks ago, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Amit is one of the nicest, most genuine, most creative people you could ever meet. Prior to founding the awesome Photojojo, he also co-founded Jelly in 2006 in NYC, a coworking community, that’s now spread to 60 cities across the world and helped spark the coworking revolution. It looks like Amit will need a bone marrow transplant quite soon. We can help him with that.

tony b:

Unlike blood transfusions, finding a genetic match for bone marrow that his body will accept is no easy task. The national bone marrow registry has 9.5 million records on file, yet the chances of someone from South Asian descent of finding a match are only 1 in 20,000.

This is where we come in. We’re going to destroy those odds.

How? By finding and registering as many people of South Asian descent as we possibly can.

Tests are easy– a simple swab of the cheek. If you’re a match, the donation involves an outpatient procedure. It’s not fun, but it’s not dangerous either. And doing it could save a life.

We are encouraging anyone of South Asian descent to take a test to see if you’re a match.

You can get a free test by mail, or, if you’re in New York, you can join us Friday, October 14th for a special party to rally support.

We’ll have test kits on hand at the party, as well as music, booze, and maybe even a photo booth. It will, for the first time, combine a House 2.0-style party with a New Work City-style party, and if you’ve ever been to either, you know they are always something special.

Please spread the word and please do everything you can to help Amit beat leukemia. He’s a superstar.

Much thanks to Tony and pals for organizing this event, and EVERYONE who’s been tweeting and reblogging.

Please help get the word out any way you can. My life quite literally depends on it.