The Awesome Foundation DC is part of the growing world-wide network of extraordinary people dedicated to forwarding and funding awesomeness in the universe.

As Founder and Dean of the DC chapter I help to coordinate an amazing board who regularly contribute $100 of their own money to enable us to award monthly grants of $1000 dollars to awesome people and their projects. We hand over these grants in cash, in a brown paper bag. They are delivered with no-strings-attached, we take no ownership or responsibility for the projects we fund, and put our trust in the general awesomeness of our grantees to deliver awesomeness to the community.

Our judging criteria is simple, and focuses on the following four things:

1. The project must demonstrate local impact for the DMV area.
2. The project must be timely – we want to see projects that can be deployed within months of the grant being awarded.
3. The project should take into account the scale of the grant. It’s $1000.
4. The project should be AWESOME. We’re not here to fund you to build a website/achieve non-profit status/pay for legal fees.

You can see my full spiel on Awesomeness a Users Guide HERE.

To date we’ve provided over  $15,000 in funding for local community projects through monthly grants, and associated fundraising events. Some of the projects funded include:

• Helping DC’s Fab Lab - a fabrication laboratory providing access to robots and lasers and 3d printing for all – find a permanent home.
• Helping one of DC’s public schools buy cooking equipment to stock their Kitchen Classroom Project – combining urban farming and cooking classes to teach kids math and life skills
• Funding the Ward 8 Farmers Market to complete a rebrand and move into their new home to limit the effects of a food desert in one of DC’s most underserved wards.
• Providing picnic blankets and infrastructure for the Petworth Jazz Festival – a weekly summer event that turned a vacant lot into a community hub for music and family fun!
• Buying a giant Zorb to recreate the boulder scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom!
• Turning a whole house into a motion sensitive musical instrument with the folks from Bluebrain.
• Any many more that you can find HERE

More on Awesome Foundation DC

• A great HufPo article written by board member Alex Howard
• A HufPo article where I talk about Awesome Foundation
• An Ignite talk that I did called Awesomeness: A Users Guide