Organization:The Awesome Foundation

Overview

The Awesome Foundation is a way to celebrate and support the brilliant ideas that every-day people have, and thus create more awesomness in the universe and at large. They do this by awarding a $1000 grant each month to a really swell idea. No strings attached. And AWESOME THINGS COME OF IT!!!

An Awesome Foundation "Chapter" is born when a group of 10 seeminlg normal people (or unruly misfits) come together as 'micro-trustees', and agree to pool $100each of their own money, every month. The self-organized group then collectively decides upon a project to recieve their collective $1000. While the Awesome Foundation's first cirlce of ten originated in Boston, MA in 2009, it has since exploded into a worldwide phenomon with 89 chapters and 899 projects funded (that's $899,000!). Each chapter is completey autonomous, and organized around geographic location or topic of interest, includeing technology, arts, food, social good, and beyond.

Ultimately, it is a way for regular people to philanthropically support other regular people's dreams, because we all know that it is regular people have the most ingenious flashes of brilliance, wildest fantasies, and diversity of interest and expriernce in making something unique happen! 

Origins

Tim Hwang founded The Awesome Foundation in 2009, to address his frustration with the unavailibility of small amounts of funding for small projects. So, he rallied 10 friends to begin this experiment in what they called 'guerilla funding'. In their home-made Foundation, anyone could be elgible for the $1000 grant by submitting a simple 7 question application on their website.

What they found was that $1000 was a very sweet amount of money- it was small enough that the trustees did not worry about risk in what they were investing in, knowing another month would role around fast, but it was plenty of funding to legitimize the awesomness of a person's idea and motivate them to GO BIG with it (like an activation energy!). The grants began to create great ripple effects in the community; festivals funded once would reoccur annunally, people's inventions would lead to more inventions, and they would find highly commendible applications at home and abroad. Via cell phone shoes, big red camera ballons in the Gulf oil spill, water-purifying boat gardens, and more, casual tinkerers were becaming bonafide citizen problem solvers! And it didn't take billionares to get them started. 

"We tap the really underestimated power of JOY- without joy the Awesome Fondation would be the Cheap and Efficient foundation, which is a lot less catchy." - Chritina Xu, Trustee

In ___, they founded the institute of awesome studies to create chapters in a place as an alternative to traditional aid (and its many inefficiencies, short sighted goals, use of indigenous resources) i.e. Haiti Earthquake New Orleans,  unite across diciplines in boundaries/ network>> decentralized, but a sum of our parts- take more risks than a traditional foundation, in adaption

Furthermore, the Awesome Chapters became valuable community nodes, for very interesting, imaginative people to congregate and brew. Trustees and participants could discover cross-disipline resources which they never would encounter in their own communities otherwise. 

Current Chapters and Some of Their Awesomness

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Steps Required

To apply to the main Awesome Foundation with an idea, use this link: , or find another local or themed Awesome Chapter to apply to.

To apply to initiate a Chapter or get involved with a current one: