Have an Awesome Idea? Enter Weekly to Win a $1,000 Grant

The following post is from the beautifully articulated TBD email by All Day Buffet.

Throughout the decades, one word has lasted to describe the unadulterated creative capacity of humanity: awesome. In a world increasingly overrun by the mundane, ordinary, and co-opted, who will defend the legacy of this essential quality?

The Awesome Foundation for Arts and Sciences awards a monthly $1,000 grant to projects “that support the interest of creating Awesome in the universe.” It’s a community organization, funded completely privately by micro-trustees around the country; payment comes in the form of cash, check, or gold doubloons.

The creators saw people with amazing ideas twisting and contorting them to conform to a grant system that devours creativity (and spirits) along the way. To combat this, the Foundation’s application takes ten minutes, and the only criterion is — you guessed it — awesomeness. Their approach offers much-needed support to small-but-genius projects. It’s also an expanding experiment in democratizing philanthropy: micro-trustees have now sprung up in London, San Francisco, New York City, Providence, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Austin.

But what IS awesome? From the Foundation: “Awesome creations are novel and non-obvious, evoking surprise and delight. Invariably, something about them perfectly reflects the essence of the medium, moment, or method of creation. Awesomeness challenges and inspires.”