We’ve gotten a tremendous amount of press, so you might have already heard, but I am one of the new Awesome Trustee’s at the local Toronto Awesome Foundation! Each month the 10 of us will gather, giving $100 each. People will submit proposals of the awesome things they would do if we gave them the $1000. We’ll pick someone, and give them a brown paper bag with the $1000 in cash inside it :-).
We were featured on the front page of the Toronto Star: Awesome Foundation offers cash for Crazy Ideas. Apparently my most notable trait is being a redhead!
I’ve wanted to start a chapter for months, I found out about the Awesome Foundation originally well before I left San Francisco. One of the first things I did when I settled down here in Toronto was blast out a call for Trustees to various mailing lists I was a part of. I didn’t really get a very good response though – turns out poor starving hacker types are not willing to part with $100/month, no matter how awesome the cause. But anyway, though various connections I managed to find 3 other people who were interested over the next few months. And then, the Awesome Foundation put me in touch with Geoffrey, who had found 3 others himself, and with our combined 8, we knew we were close. Geoffrey is a *way* better organizer than I am, and he took charge, we had our first dinner together, and less than a week after that we launched. The speed of launch, and then the overwhelming media attention, is just awesome, to go from nothing to this over a period of about two weeks just proves that ideas do have power!
I’ll blog here about our first winner as well, which will happen sometime in February, so stay tuned!