Remember when you wanted to train chihuahuas as sled dogs and have an all-baby Iditarod across the Alaskan wilderness, but the lady at the bank said it was a lawsuit waiting to happen and wouldn’t lend you the money to get the idea off the ground? Remember how you wished there was another way fund your awesome, Wile E. Coyote-esqe schemes?
Enter the Awesome Foundation. Every month, chapters around the world give $1,000, no strings attached, to people with cool ideas that might otherwise never come to fruition.
It works like this: in each chapter, ten “Trustees of Awesomeness” pony up $100 every month and hold an open submissions process to find a project which will “conserve, sustain and support the worldwide ecosystem of awesomeness.” The micro-grants are unconditional; there’s no follow-up, no reporting and the Foundation doesn’t want any ownership in your ideas. You shout “eureka,” you get a thousand bucks and you let your awesome flag fly.
Projects funded so far have ranged from the whimsical to the cultural to the environmental. The first grant went to architect Hansy Better Barraza, who built a giant hammock in a Boston park. Other projects have included a hip-hop almanac in New York, a rooftop honey farm in Melbourne and a scarf-every-day-for-a-month endeavor from an artist in San Francisco who posted “how-to” info online.
The Awesome Foundation was founded by Tim Hwang in Boston in the summer of 2009, with a mandate to move forward “the interest of awesomeness in the universe.” It was soon recognized as being pretty awesome itself, and has since expanded to more than a dozen locations, including New York, Los Angeles, Berlin and Melbourne. (Though it’s not all about geography; there’s a chapter called “Food” which has a thematic focus).
The most recent iteration of the Foundation just opened its virtual doors in Toronto, Canada in mid-January, and will announce its first grant on February 15. Toronto has embraced awesomeness so enthusiastically that only a couple weeks after the launch, more than a hundred ideas had been submitted, including ones for a sparkler festival down the city’s main street, a giant cupcake party (the party is giant, not the cupcakes, although either would probably work), and the elegant, to-the-point entry “Laser Monkeys.” What’s more, there’s already a waiting list for would-be trustees, and a second chapter is being contemplated.
That the concept has captured the public imagination isn’t surprising to Martin Ryan, one of the Toronto trustees, who says “These projects illustrate possibilities … and that’s exciting for people.”
But it’s not just the grant recipients who win. As Ryan says, the Awesome Foundation “legitimizes the pursuit of awesomeness in the people we don’t fund. If we did nothing but get people to write down their ideas and tell them there’s a place where someone will read them and pay attention, that’d still be great.” Time to start writing.
Photo 1 by Jillian York via Flickr, photo 2 courtesy of the Awesome Foundation.