Archive for November, 2011

LA’s Mark MacInnis is Awesome.

Thursday, November 17th, 2011

Mark MacInnis is a filmmaker. Big whoop.
Mark MacInnis directed a great documentary about urban farmers in Detroit. OK, now I’m intrigued…
Mark MacInnis is starting a project to build farms at urban high schools around the country, starting with LA. OK, that’s AWESOME.

And that’s why he’s the winner of the latest 1K Awesome Grant from Awesome Foundation – LA!

Mark’s Urban Roots/Field of Dreams project has committed to getting urban farms going at five LA high schools, starting with this big plot of nothin’ at Garfield HS in East LA:

It’s a big job, and we hope that 1K from us will be a good start. But just in case it’s not enough (spoiler alert: it’s not enough), we’re helping to throw him this fundraiser on December 3rd. Buy a ticket at Eventbrite and be there, or be square.

PS – We’re not the first Awesome Chapter to get amped up by urban farms (see Awesome Foundation NYC). This is one instance where we are happy to be copycats. Excelsior!

Posted by Dan Taberski at 7:14 pm Comments

Awesome Boston goes Supersized!

Monday, November 14th, 2011

A cell undergoing division

Awesome Foundation Boston recently had a call for trustees. So many talented, qualified people applied that we decided to undergo a crazy experiment: what if we just took them all and double in size? We don’t know what our long-term plan will be; there’s been talk of eventually splitting into two chapters, but we’re playing it by ear.

For now, we’d like to welcome these lovely folks into the ever-bigger Awesome Foundation family. Collectively, the weight of their awesomeness is pretty staggering!

Want to meet them IRL?
Come by MassChallenge for our next event on Wednesday, November 16th!


Mark Birchem has been a Boston area entrepreneur for the past 25 years, branching out into the world of high and low tech startups as both advisor and owner. Mark makes time to be SuperDad, local art hound, relentless foodie, and Board Member of the Big Brother Big Sister Foundation. His wife Patricia thinks that all his toy robots would look much better on display in his office.
mitcho (@themitcho) is a PhD student in Linguistics at MIT, researching formal models of syntax and semantics, with a focus on Mandarin Chinese and Japanese. He lives a parallel life in code and has been active in the Mozilla and WordPress communities working on projects such as Ubiquity, Panorama, and Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Bruno Germansderfer (@brunog) is a professional dessert taster who can out-chess and out-drink most people. By day, he is an IT consultant at Glasshouse Technologies. He is interested in putting together a competitive cooking league in Boston.
Suzanne Greenwald has over twenty years of educational research, consulting, college advising and writing experience. Co-Author of Smart Moves for Liberal Arts Grads: Finding a Path to Your Perfect Career, Suzanne is currently working on a sequel for the “post- millennial” set. She is also an Anglophile, triathlete, thespian, and foodie nerd.
Dan Hung (@danhung) is an investor in healthcare and technology companies by day and a web tinkerer by night. He is a competitive eater of McRibs and owns a sushi boat.
Jonathan Lansey is a Research Scientist at Aptima in Applied Mathematics. His background and current work spans a wide range of topics including artificial brains, space weather, bio-informatics, and human vision. He is especially interested in funding projects that combine art with science because they have a dedicated soft spot in his heart.
Bob Mason (@boboramason) is the co-founder and CTO of Brightcove, an online video platform based in Cambridge. He is passionate about supporting local agriculture, and he enjoys all kinds of fast outdoor movement.
Andrés Monroy-Hernández (@andresmh) is a social computing researcher interested in the design and study of online communities. He examines how awesomeness (and awfulness) emerge from online interactions. He is currently a postdoc at Microsoft Research and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Sam Novey (@noveyator) is an organizer and occasional burger-man who lives in South Boston. By day he works at a real foundation called Boston Rising.
Linda Pizzuti (@linda_pizzuti) is passionate about making Boston a world-class city through all kinds of awesomefication projects. Among many things, she is a television producer and the director of the Red Sox Foundation and the John W. Henry Foundation.
Andy Sellars (@andy_sellars) is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, where he works as a staff attorney at the Citizen Media Law Project. He studies intellectual property and online free speech, and helps run a legal referral network for online journalists and digital media creators. He is also a musician and a proud Bostonian.

Posted by Christina Xu at 8:26 pm Comments

Boston Mega Fellowship Event – Nov 16th

Tuesday, November 8th, 2011

Lots has been going on behind the scenes in Awesometonia, and we’re ready to let the proverbial cats out of the imaginary bag. Boston has a lot of awesome. So much so that the response to our recent trustee search was insane – in a good way. We’re now a legion of 23 with a few area university and high school chapters in the works.

So, what does this mean for @awesomebos? Dunno. It could end up in any number of iterations: one big pile of awesome, topical chapters, or Sharks vs. Jets split. (If it’s the latter, look out for fab dance numbers and moving original ballads.)

Here’s what we do know: we’re giving out 2X as much $ and that’s something to CELEBRATE! Meet the new members & hear four recent fellows talk about their projects.

Join us at MassChallenge on Wednesday, November 16th – 7PM

Here’s the line-up:

  • ‘Tobin School Mural’
    Internationally renowned Boston artist, Caleb Neelon took what was once a bleak, blank wall and turned it into a colorful beacon of creativity for elementary school students in Mission Hill.
  • ‘Cronicas de Heroes’
    During periods of civil unrest and social disorder, the focus on chaos in media coverage is often at the expense of community morale. Guerra reignites civic pride by mapping and publicizing the good deeds of every day citizens.
  • ‘On the Go – International Outhouse Museum’
    Performance artist, Jay Critchley, is on a mission to save soon-to-be demolished historic outhouses and turn them into a travelling exhibit aimed at sparking discussion about the collective effect consumption habits have on the environment.

Keep your eye on the blog in the week leading up to the event for more info about our fellows and new members!

This event is FREE + open to the public. Only catch?
Registration is required.
Not on the list given to building security? You shall not pass!!!

Posted by Kara Brickman at 10:35 pm Comments

Awesome NYC Fall Grant: Bushwick City Farms

Monday, November 7th, 2011

Announcing Awesome NYC’s October grant: Bushwick City Farms:

Bushwick City Farms is a network of open spaces run by neighborhood volunteers that provides free food, clothing and educational programs for the community. BCF farms create a unique opportunity to experience active models of responsible food production in the city. In addition to producing free organic vegetables and eggs at the farm’s main locations, we host school field trips and youth service groups, hold free beginner’s English classes for speakers of other languages, and coordinate with local businesses to distribute bread and fresh produce donations. Every Sunday free food and clothing is distributed at the farms main location at 897 Broadway.

We collaborate with property-owners for the free availability of their vacant, often neglected lots and turn these spaces into beautiful productive community farms that are safe for the community to enjoy. With the help of local community residents BCF cleans out the lots, constructs raised vegetable beds, chicken coops and ranges, community compost systems and greenhouses, all from recycled (dumpstered) materials. BCF transforms vacant lots into community green spaces which beautify the block, attract passersby, and serve as an educational, environmental and humanitarian resource for the entire neighborhood. BCF also started a school garden program that provides public schools with free garden construction and maintenance, we built and maintain a garden for PS 123. Our next project is a school garden for PS 377 which will be funded by the Awesome Foundation Grant! This project will include building raised veggie beds, a compost system and planting several fruit trees, to transform the school space into a mini farm for the students to maintain & enjoy.

Posted by Lee-Sean Huang at 3:51 pm Comments

AF Sydney June recipient is all about shredin’ sustainably

Monday, November 7th, 2011

Back in June we funded a project that we’d love to share with you (yes, the Awesome Foundation Sydney folks are busy…better late than never, right?!). It’s all about shredin’ sustainably, and by shredin’ we’re talking high performance surfing. Our recipient Chris Anderson is a keen surfer from a scenic coastal town called Minnamurra, known for its ‘devilish’ reef breaks,

“I have a passion for design and high performance surfing as it is pretty dam awesome – big airs, gnarly waves, fast spins, shredding turns and of course, insane wipeouts. High performance surfboards need to cope with many bashings whilst also needing to be very lightweight. The result is that they often snap straight in half when under high pressure.

As surfers churn through multiple boards a year they are also churning through many nasty resources. Just one board uses around 2L of petroleum, which is combined with other toxic chemicals to create EPS (expanded polystyrene) a horrible pollutant that takes decades to rot in land fill – stuff that is ultimately ruining the environment we love to play in.”

His solution to this problem is to prototype a new kind of surfboard, one that uses sustainable materials but doesn’t trade off other considerations like great design, strength and performance. The details of this are, for now, patent pending, so we can’t give away too many of his secrets but I can tell you that he and his mates are going to be, in his words, “surfing the hell out of” the prototypes once they are in the world. Suffice to say, we think Chris is onto a great thing, and we can’t wait to see what he’s come up.

Posted by Renae Mason at 5:10 am Comments