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The Awesome Foundation’s Awesome Microgrants

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The Awesome Foundation is a global community advancing the interest of awesome in the universe, $1000 at a time. Each fully autonomous chapter supports awesome projects through micro-grants, usually given out monthly. These micro-grants, $1000 or the local equivalent, come out of pockets of the chapter’s “trustees” and are given on a no-strings-attached basis to people and groups working on awesome projects. To date, over $1.5 million has been given to 1,506 projects across the world.

 

Erin Bregman, EAP 2014/15 Arts & Enterprise fellow first met San Francisco Awesome Foundation founder Jesse Taggert when Little Opera became an Awesome Foundation grantee in 2011.

 
Erin: I was just reading about the origins of the Awesome Foundation, and see that it started with Tim Hwang in Boston in 2008/2009. Were you involved in the early days of the Awesome Foundation? How did you first get involved?

Jesse: I spun up the San Francisco chapter in May of 2010. I think we were the third chapter to launch, or close to it. I had just started to “use Twitter” and saw some tweets about this interesting thing happening back in Boston, where I originally moved from. I loved the idea, and gently gave them a hard time for having an awesome board of all guys (I actually didn’t realize at the time that some of the names on their board were in fact those of women). Once they had a few friends in San Francisco interested, they contacted me and asked if I wanted to start the San Francisco chapter. 

Erin: What does it take to found a chapter of the Awesome Foundation?

Jesse: You just need ten people who want to donate $100/month each. Chapters are decentralized, self-funding units. If you can pull together a group of folks that are willing to crowd source $1,000 a month and have a good (and kind and just) sense of awesome, you can do it to. 

Erin: What was the strangest application you remember receiving?

Jesse: Ha! There are so many contenders. The guy that wanted $1000 to sit in a coffee shop and write while high, a fellow who wanted to buy a firearm with a grant. My personal, plausible favorite, that I still wish we funded, was a scholar in Bhutan (or perhaps Nepal) who wanted to create a dictionary of a dying local dialect. Another chapter, I later found out, did end up funding that. I can only imagine what some of the applications have been in the last two years since I moved on. 

 

Superheroes at Angel Island. June 2014 Grantee

 

Erin: What would a typical conversation be like among trustees, as you tried to decide who to award the grant to in a given month? 

Jesse: There was never a typical conversation, except for our occasional digressions into deep unanswerable questions like “just what is awesome?” Some months, there’d be an obvious grant application that just hit the mark. We valued quirky and artsy over purely needs-based asks. We also wanted to support people (and this often meant individuals or small groups over established non-profits) who may never have done an outward facing project before. The stakes were low — from a single trustee’s point of view it was $100 a shot. So if some projects didn’t pan out, it was okay. You still had eleven more to invest in.

Erin: Do you think the model would work as well with a different dollar amount? Or is there something about $1,000 that hits a sweet spot?

Jesse: I’d often joke that $1,000 does not get you much in San Francisco these days, but that amount can mean a lot to people. There’s also the power of the symbolic gesture of awarding faith to a person, no matter the financial  amount. 

Villainette: Bangs May 2015 Grantee

Erin: There are more than 80 active chapters of the Awesome Foundation operating around the world right now. Why do you think the Awesome Foundation has been so successful?

Jesse: It’s low risk investment giving. Or “Mini-Macarthur grants”, to use Tim’s phrase. At the same time, you’re having a great time meeting people in your community. The simple online application and the low pressure protocol for awarding grants is just plain fun! And then meeting the folks you give the award to and attending their events is so so so rewarding. 

Erin: Is there much communication or interaction between the different chapters?

Jesse: For sure. There’s a cross-chapter email group list that is active, and every year or so there’s an international “Awesome Summit”. So far the summit’s been held in Boston, New York, and Ottowa. The first year we had it, we spent the first few hours just walking around and talking to each other in awe. “You exist! Tell me all about what it’s like in Boston, Sydney, Philadelphia, Nova Scotia, Seattle, Houston…”  We talk a lot about what makes awesome, how to keep trustees engaged, how to get good applicants. 

Although I finally “retired” to do more of my own creative work, I think about the Awesome Foundation often and am still in touch with some of the current trustees. The San Francisco chapter doesn’t have the bandwidth to do a lot of promotion, but they are still out there awarding $1000 grants, month after month. Check them out!

War Gastronomy recipes of Relocation. April 2015 Grantee

Featured: Grow’n & Chef’n Proper in Lower W. Oakland!. May 2015 Grantee.

Learning the Difference between Building and Buying

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Learning the Difference Between Building and BuyingThis is part two in a three-part series by Carrie Blanding on emerging trends in philanthropy.

If you haven’t yet read George Overholser’s seminal piece “Building Is Not Buying,” you should stop everything and do it now. The essay is only ten pages long, but it packs a punch!

In the piece, Overholser encourages nonprofits and their funders to distinguish between growth capital and revenue-like funding, and to track this income separately in their budgets.

Once you get the basic definitions down, tracking capital growth and revenue-like funding differently is a very simple idea, but the implications for philanthropy are huge.

Growth capital (“building” money) generally involves one-time grants in which the donor invests to help you get started but doesn’t intend to keep giving at the same level in future years. Think of this like start-up capital invested in a for-profit business.

Revenue-like funding (“buying” money) is income that could reliably be sustained or replaced as part of the organization’s regular operating budget. It buys a service or project, in the same way that customer purchases sustain a for-profit business.

This simple-yet-powerful distinction puts a whole new lens on donations and internal accounting. It teaches funders to be more realistic about their goals, time frame, and gift amounts. It teaches funded organizations to budget more effectively and to better plan new growth initiatives.

For example, an organization I used to work for once received a one-time, nonrenewable grant to overhaul its marketing department. It was meant to be an investment that would pay for itself when the grant period was over because our improved systems would bring in new income. But the grant amount was small and the time-frame short, relative to the task at hand.

Basically, it was a typical “building” style grant, but with “buying” level resources. Looking back, it’s not surprising that the results fell short of what we had envisioned. I dream of going back in time and giving everyone involved a copy of Overholser’s article (although I don’t think it had been written yet).

The article would have helped the funder to design the grant more realistically, and maybe we would have had more success in achieving our goals.

Fortunately, this knowledge is now available and it’s starting to spread. The Nonprofit Finance Fund has developed a whole set of services around Overholser’s notion of building versus buying, including a series of publications that specifically apply to the arts.

Thanks to the Doris Duke Foundation, arts organizations are leading the way when it comes to implementing these new ideas. Ten arts organizations were among the earliest beneficiaries of cutting-edge “change capital” grants aimed at building their organizations (and our knowledge) in a meaningful way. The lessons learned from these first grants were published just a few months ago.

Whether or not your funders are thinking in these terms yet, just learning the basic concepts in Overholser’s article will give you a powerful new perspective on fundraising, income, and budgeting.

Up next: An optimistic look at the challenges and benefits of outcome-oriented philanthropy. And don’t miss part one about improved assessment tools for donors.

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About Carrie Blanding

Carrie Blanding is currently on a research sabbatical in which she gets to blissfully romp through the most interesting nonprofit literature every day. She is particularly fascinated by organizational sustainability, personal resilience, effective philanthropy, and management theory.

Previously, she has been executive director of the the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and co-founder/principal of Next Big Thing Children’s Theatre. She earned her bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and received the department award for academic achievement.

An avid singer, Carrie has at times been a member of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, a jazz vocalist, and a singer-songwriter pouring her heart out at your neighborhood bar.