It was perhaps out of character that Nick and I both arrived on bikes for the handover of Awesome Foundation Melbourne’s March grant, given Nick runs the not for profit group Tram Sessions. Tram Sessions encourage Melbourne artists and bands to perform on city trams, trying to bring more culture into the public space. The sessions are recorded and uploaded to the Tram Sessions website, where you can see the awesome in action.
We are happy to announce LA’s APRIL grant winner – LA Compton Junior Posse. In 1988 Mayisha Akbar created, somewhat by accident, a safe haven for kids in Compton.
Little known fact to most, the Richland Farms area of Compton is zoned for farming. Many people have ranches and raise horses in a part of Los Angeles that is widely perceived as unsafe. A mother of three, Mayisha moved to Compton to buy a farm where she could raise horses. What she quickly realized was that in Compton, many children’s basic needs are not being met. Her own children slowly brought more and more neighborhood kids back to the farm after school to play, for meals, and so on. Mayisha found that horses acted as a motivational tool for the children, and slowly but surely has formed a strong organization teaching kids to ride.
Through Mayisha’s backyard program, hundreds of young people ages 5-18 have learned to take care for and communicate with horses, many even compete! Mayisha provides kids with a sense of self-worth and belonging and a real life skill.
We think the Compton Junior Posse is awesome! If you want to donate or check out the posse, go here: http://www.comptonjrposse.org/
Image by Patrick Donnelly who will be demoing his AWESOME Light Painting at the party!
We just awarded our March Grant to the super talented Experience Counterpoint. Now, if you’re in DC this week, you will have the opportunity to Experience Counterpoint for yourself at our launch party this Wednesday 23rd March. From 6:30 pm at One Lounge: 1606 20th Street NW • Washington, DC20009.
More details and tickets here: http://dcawesome.eventbrite.com/.
Counterpoint will be joined by a host of other Awesome people and projects in the “Awesome Showcase”, where you will have a chance to get to know them, learn about their projects, and donate “Tokens of Awesome” (which we will convert into cold hard “cee ay dollar sign ache” at the end of the night) to help further their awesome projects!
The showcase will represent the wide range of projects we hear from and will include such awesomeness as:
The party is open to everyone awesome, but priority will be given to ticket holders, so get in and grab yours now! http://dcawesome.eventbrite.com/
Have you experienced awesomeness? Well Experience Counterpoint might get you close.
They’re a guerrilla chamber orchestra dedicated to pushing the boundaries of classical music and performance art who won the March DC Awesome grant for their project “Audio Warhol”. We hope that with our support, Experience CounterPoint can bring their next exciting performance to a wider audience to experience awesomeness!
You can listen to some of Counterpoint’s work here: http://www.experiencecounterpoint.org/experience/listen.html
Here’s what they had to say about winning the Awesome Foundation Grant:
Winning the Awesome Foundation DC grant is something that couldn’t come at a better time for us. We have recently finished a few amazing events, but we are still bursting with innovative ideas! While we would love to not have to think about it, money is definitely a major concern when we are creating and executing a project. This grant will help us bring to life one of our new projects: Audio Warhol. The Awesome Foundation’s support will help spur an exciting and artistically sophisticated experience for both the audience and CounterPoint to enjoy. It will be truly Awesome and we can’t wait to plan it.
CounterPoint is about inclusion, bringing music and art to all people. As in Warhol’s art, much of the music that classical musicians perform is very conceptually sophisticated and can be either intimidating or perceived as elitist. Our goal as an organization in this project is to bring the wonderful and exciting emotions and thoughts that drive this usually inaccessible music and art into an arena that makes it much more accessible (and relevant) to the average person. As musicians, we are trained to understand why and how the music we play is relevant to our society.
We want to bring that relevance of music and art to people in an open and exciting manner that helps them experience it in a memorable way as well. We want to communicate with people, and we want to make sure that we are able to do that without any sense of exclusion. We don’t want people to be scared off when they see violins, violas, cellos, and basses!
We hope that this project will bring more of an awareness to arts in DC and how they other DC organizations can be more exciting and spontaneous.
How can you help Experience Counterpoint be more awesome?
They need more financial support. Visit their site www.experiencecounterpoint.org, contact them at info@experiencecounterpoint.org, book them for shows, etc.
And finally, if you’re thinking of applying for an awesome grant, the Counterpointers have some advice for you some advice for you:
The thoughts that guided us while applying for this grant seem to mirror much of the spirit of the Awesome Foundation. We have a commitment to bring music and art to the community, but we also want to make sure that is accessible to all people. We also want to make sure that our organization can use its platform to highlight causes that need the public’s help. So in this way, we would suggest that people applying for the Awesome Foundation Grant should highlight not only what they do as an organization that is creative, but also what they have done with their creativity that has helped communities and causes that deserve the public’s attention.
Over at AF-San Francisco, we’ve been a little bit obsessed lately by the “X a day” category of Foundation applications. They’re discrete, highly do-able, and result in a ton of awesome products being released into the universe. We had such a great time seeing Meredith Scheff’s Scarf-A-Day project take shape last month that we decided to follow up that grant with another project that takes the model in a entirely new and great direction.
To that end, thrilled to announce that our March Awesome Fellowship goes out to the endlessly wonderful Bay Area artist Adam Davis, who is embarking on a mission to paint one hundred bite-sized (around 4” x 4”) and big sized (yet to come!) paintings of dinosaurs over the next month or so. He will then engage in a worldwide hide-and-seek game, caching the dinosaurs in secret locations and releasing clues (some clues leading to yet more clues) to their location on his project blog.
Once the dinosaurs are located, they are yours to keep. Four have been located so far around the Bay Area (including this crazy story and the first dinosaur being hidden at the weird and wonderful Jejune Institute), and there’s many more on the way. There’s tons to love about the project (dinosaurs), and we couldn’t be happier funding the project.
If you’d like to join in the search for dinosaurs, keep an eye out here. Happy hunting!