Institute on Higher Awesome Studies

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!