Institute on Higher Awesome Studies

The Institute on Higher Awesome Studies is incredibly proud to present the first-ever Awesome Summit, July 21-23, 2012 in Cambridge, MA!

On the 3rd anniversary of the first meeting of the Awesome Foundation, we are having a two-part summit to celebrate, discuss, and hack on our founding principles: peer-to-peer giving, democratizing grants, and making our communities more awesome.

Awesome Summit: Assemble (July 21st-22nd) will be a meetup and workathon for Awesome Foundation affiliates ONLY. Representatives from each of our chapters will gather to meet each other, share advice and experiences, and work on shared resources to help spread our model even further. If you’re a member of an Awesome Foundation chapter and would like an invite, please email us.

Awesome Summit: Connect (July 23rd) is open to the public and will extend the discussion to the wider community of people who are experimenting in the philanthropy/community development space. Join representatives from tons of organizations like Kickstarter, DonorsChoose.org, and New Urban Mechanics in discussing issues like decentralized organizations and open brands, encouraging engaged donors, and the legal and political infrastructure we need. We want this to serve as a launching point for collaborations between these various organizations, and as a place to discuss the broader questions facing all the new organizations that are emerging in this field.

We’re currently looking for sponsors and volunteers of all levels to help us put this together. Huge thanks to the Knight Foundation for being an early sponsor, and to the Center for Civic Media for hosting us! If you believe in awesomeness, consider joining us!

Thanks to Jose Zamora of Knight for catching this great write-up from the International Journalists’ Network of a Poynter chat we did last week about how the Awesome Foundation model can work with journalism. Margaret Looney summarized the chat into five main points, including:

Be prepared for big results. Chancellor of the Institute for Higher Awesome Studies, Christina Xu gave the lowdown on microgrants to the Poynter Institute in a recent live chat. She explains that a microgrant is “enough to encourage someone with a great idea to build a prototype which they can then show to bigger funders.” That’s exactly how the Serval Project worked out, a project that started with a US$1,000 Awesome grant to build a Mesh Potato mobile network giving off-the-grid communities a voice, especially in natural disaster events. The prototype garnered ABC’s attention in Australia and the project’s founder earned a US$360,000 grant to continue research.

Catch the rest of the article here and share it with all your journalist friends! And keep your eyes peeled for some exciting news from Awesome News Taskforce: Detroit in the next month!

Awesome Announcements

• Help fund Awesome Melbourne’s MEGA Grant on Pozible!
• Awesome Food got a new trustee! Welcome to the group, Darryl Pierce!
• Awesome Boston’s Andrew Sempere is speaking on a panel at the Cambridge Public Library tonight about funding and the arts.

Awesome in the News

• The Shoestring Launch blog from Australia writes up the Awesome Foundation.

Reading

• Kiva launches a new peer-to-peer loans.
• Study shows that in the US, minorities are more generous than Whites.

Awesome Announcements

• Awesome Newmarket may be the first-ever Awesome Foundation backed by a Chamber of Commerce.
• Awesome Halifax is planning on a February launch, and has already been featured on CBC TV and Global TV as well as this great Chronicle Herald article.
• Awesome Seattle’s latest grant went to Sunny Spot, a mobile app to help you find light in downtown Seattle.
• Awesome Food’s latest grant has gone to the NYC-based Randwiches project, a project that has delivered over 360 beautifully handcrafted surprise sandwiches to its customers. 

This week we handed out $2000!

Awesome Events

• Awesome Melbourne is throwing a MEGA GRANT PARTY on February 22nd to celebrate having pumped $12,000 worth of awesome into Melbourne.
• Awesome Boston had a very successful second Awesome Office Hours on January 12th; tons of people came! 
• The Institute on Higher Awesome Studies is throwing a party for Awesome Foundation at SXSW 2012 on March 11th from 1-3 PM. Save the date!

Awesome in the News

• Awesome Foundation is featured in the Idealist blog!
• Awesome Ottawa’s grant to help save an endangered language gets another great writeup.

Reading

• Berkman and Pew have released a first study of mobile giving.
• Jan Chipchase on design imperialism.

Happy new year, everyone! It’s been a quiet two weeks because of the holidays, but judging by the deadline announcement it’s going to be a dynamite January. Thanks for spreading the word in 2011, and may 2012 be even better!

Awesome Announcements

• Awesome Airdrie’s first $1000 grant went to Support Local Airdrie Musicians (SLAM). This was actually back on December 15th, but we’ve just heard about it!

Awesome in the News

• Awesome Toronto’s successes and tribulations in 2011 are chronicled by the Toronto Star.
• Awesome Pittsburgh got written up in Challenger Brand News for being a brand that challenges the status quo.
• Awesome Tampa Bay was featured in this month’s Florida Trend magazine. They have a snapshot of the article!

Reading

• Informal support networks help those in need more than charities.
• WDET’s survey on what would make people move to Detroit.
• The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business by Umair Haque. (Yes, this is what I read on beach vacations.)

Awesome Announcements

• Awesome Toronto’s March grant winner, Great Wall of Tics, is up and running!
• Awesome DC has decided to give a $1000 grant to an #OccupyArt Guerilla Gallery; here’s the writeup from the winners! 
• Awesome Kingston has given a $1000 grant to Jeannie’s Place, a HIV/AIDS Resource Centre!
• Awesome Ottawa has given their December grant to Lauren Gawne for her project to digitize the Kagate language!
• Awesome SF’s December grant goes to Erin Bergman of the Little Opera company, where kids write and perform their own complete operas.
• Awesome Melbourne’s grant this month goes to the Biography Program, an initiative to help people in aged care write their own life stories.

Total money announced this week: $5000!

Awesome Events

• Awesome Boston had their first Awesome Office Hours; 3 potential applicants and a past winner came by! Look for the next installment in the new year.
• Awesome Pittsburgh’s next award event will be on January 15th, 2012.

Awesome in the News

• Awesome Connecticut gets a writeup in the Daily Greenwich.
• The Washington Post writes about Occupy DC’s guerilla galleries, one of which is funded by Awesome DC! 
• Awesome Ottawa’s latest fellow, Lauren Gawne, writes about her project. 
• Awesome Foundation joins Kickstarter, DonorsChoose.org, and Lucy Bernholz on a Brian Lehrer show segment about new giving.

Reading

• On Reddit & Altruism.
• Black male achievement is more than just good grades.
• The livetweeting from Model D/WDET’s panel about gentrification in Detroit.

Anatomy of an Awesome Foundation grant, picture by Felix Jung.

Awesome Announcements

• We are looking for web developers to rehaul the Awesome Foundation website.
• Awesome DC dropped THREE writeups of their $1000 grants on us: Sound Garden, Students Reinvent the World, and CodeNow.
• Awesome Melbourne has teamed up with Pozible, a crowdfunding platform, to create some extra awesome. Here’s Pozible’s take on it!
• Awesome Montreal/La Fondation Formidable gave their first $1000 grant to Alley Kids.
• Awesome Seattle’s second $1000 grant goes to ONN/OF, Seattle’s first festival of lights.
• Full writeup of Awesome Pittsburgh’s first two winners.
• Awesome Grand Rapids awarded a $1000 grant to Heels that Heal.

Total money announced this week: $6000!

Awesome Events

• Awesome Boston is holding their first office hours tonight, 6-8 PM in Cambridge!
• Awesome Airdrie is about to hold their first Pitch Night tonight!
• Awesome Berlin is handing out their next award on February 2nd, 2012.
• Great writeup of Awesome Chicago’s last grant event by the winner himself, QR code poet Felix Jung.
• Awesome Pittsburgh’s first grant event gets some love.
• A past Awesome DC winner, Experience Counterpoint, did a guerilla performance inside the National Gallery.
• Awesome DC wrote up a dinner they had for one of their grantees, Bluebrain, back in September.

Awesome in the News

• Awesome Food’s Jennifer 8. Lee talks about giving awesomely on Marketplace.
• Awesome Food’s latest winner, Snap Gardens, is featured by Bread.org after receiving the grant.
• Awesome Kingston gets written up in the Whig-Standard.
• Wired and Y Combinator are having an auction to benefit the Institute on Higher Awesome Studies.
• Awesome Foundation gets a loving writeup in this blog.

Reading

• Artist Bailout, the latest instance of Feast, gives small grants to artists in LA. 
• In the US, holidays are the best season for giving.

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.

Sorry for missing last week, everyone! Thanksgiving made me all confused. Please accept this picture of kids with money, courtesy AF Calgary, as an apology.

Awesome Announcements

• A2Awesome (Ann Arbor) has launched!
• AF LA announces their newest grant and fundraiser.
• AF SF has been putting up photos of their recently funded projects on Facebook. A past fellow, Ken Murphy, has posted a year’s worth of his Awesome-funded “History of the Sky” project up as a gorgeous video.
• Awesome Tampa Bay is having an event on December 5th.
• Awesome Pittsburgh is also having its first event on December 5th, at which it will announce not one but TWO grants!
• Awesome Montreal/La Fondation Formidable is having its first event on December 6th. Good luck, guys!
• Awesome Calgary gave their last grant of the year to the Haysboro School Edible Garden. They also put up photos of the party they sponsored celebrating a beloved local institution.
• Awesome Melbourne gave a giant cheque to the Positive Parks project last month, which will debut in February 2012 (follow along on Facebook here). This month, their grant went to their youngest grantees yet (ages 12 & 16) for making the “Cut In Half” charity cookbook benefitting Little Dreamers.
• Awesome Ottawa awards its November grant to Anne Patterson of the Hello Ottawa! blog.

Awesome in the News

• Christina Xu’s talk about the Institute on Higher Awesome Studies and Awesome Foundation at MIT is up in video highlight form and thorough liveblogging form.
• Tim Hwang, founder of Awesome Foundation, wrote a blogpost on Too big to be Awesome at the PBS Idea Lab:
• A2Awesome (Ann Arbor) gets tons of great press about their launch from AnnArbor.com, Heritage Newspapers, and even the AV Club Ann Arbor.
• Glowing writeups of Awesome Foundation appeared in Auckland’s Creative Philanthropy blog as well as the blog Awesome Your Life, which called our application “the shortest and friendliest grant application I’ve ever seen!”

Reading

• The subtle condescension of ICT4D by White African.
• Mexico City residents stop waiting for the city and draws their own bike lanes.
• Thinking about Occupy Wall Street as an “API”.

Awesome Announcements

• Awesome Boston has doubled in size and are throwing a mega-party to celebrate Caleb Neelon and his Tobin School Mural, Jay Critchley and his International Outhouse Museum, and Yesica Guerra’s Cronicas de Heroes.
• Awesome Calgary is holding their final Thousand Dollar Thursday of 2011 on November 24th. They are also sponsoring a send-off party for an iconic Calgary gym. They are also looking for a new trustee!
• Awesome LA is presenting a benefit for putting farms in schools in conjunction with Mark McInnis of the film Urban Roots and artist Anthony James.
• Awesome Pittsburgh has just closed their first round of submissions and received over 50 proposals!
• Awesome Montreal / La Fondation Formidable had their first deliberation! Excited to hear what they picked.
• A past Awesome NYC fellow, Matthew Borgatti, reached his goal on Kickstarter to expand the Anywhere Organ. Congrats, Matthew!

Awesome in the News

• Awesome Boston was featured in an article about microfunding opportunities in the Boston Phoenix.
• Awesome Boston and IHAS were featured on the Callie Crossley show on WGBH.
• Awesome Kingston gets a great writeup in the Kingston EMC.
• Awesome Calgary trustees were guests on Aubrey’s Shindig, a radio show on CJSW. 
• Awesome Foundation gets a nice shoutout from Nathaniel James, Dean of AF-Seattle, in his profile of Lucy Bernholz for Fast Coexist.

Readings

• A History of the Tax-Exempt Sector, according to the IRS.
• Angels of the Right, a project exploring relationships between conservative organizations and foundations (here’s the writeup).
• Lucy Bernholz’s supplement to her profile, including lots of resources and great entities.