Ann Arbor Awesome Foundation

05/28/2024

03/27/2024

Thank YOU Michigan Foster Care Closet for all you do to help foster children and families! We're honored to support your work.

Thank you Ann Arbor Awesome Foundation for your generous grant! 🎉 With your support, we were able to purchase much-needed new underwear to stock our shelves. Your donation makes a huge difference in ensuring that children in foster care have access to essential clothing. Thanks for making a positive impact!

04/16/2022

We had a great time visiting Jake and Jasmine at our recent grant recipient, 27th Letter Books, this morning! They, along with owners Drew and Erin, are doing an amazing job creating a beautiful new community hub in Southwest Detroit (despite dealing with a flood and a car crashing through their front window in their first year!). Stop by and buy some books next time you’re in the area.

03/27/2022

03/05/2022

We visited our friends and recent grantees at Detroit Zine Fest today! We bought way too many zines. Congrats to Yhasmin and the team on a wonderful event.

10/22/2020

Would $1,000 help you or your organization make a difference? The Ann Arbor Awesome Foundation awards a $1,000 mini-grant every month to someone who is doing something awesome for our community. Learn more and fill out our simple application here: https://www.awesomefoundation.org/en/chapters/ann-arbor

Here's what just a few of our past grantees have said about their awards:

"The grant we received helped us acquire a much needed tool shed for our farm! AWESOME!" - Melvin Parson, We the People Opportunity Farm

“We utilized the funds to provide three doula training scholarships to disadvantaged women in Wayne and Washtenaw counties. Since then, our three scholarship recipients have assisted in >10 births. This was so successful that we provided three more training scholarships again this year. Thank you A2 Awesome!” - Ashton Steele, Southeast Michigan Doula Project

“We were awarded money to do a community mural. We had such success with the first one we went on to do three more and other community art projects.” - Lynne Settles, former Ypsilanti Community Schools teacher

06/22/2020

Thanks to All About Ann Arbor for this Awesome coverage!

The Ann Arbor Awesome Foundation offers $1,000 micro-grants to those with awesome projects.

04/24/2020

Our second $1,000 mini-grant this month went to 35 Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning students, faculty, and alumni who are creating face shields for local healthcare workers. The group is using its 3-D printers to create bands for the shields and then using the Taubman College's knife cutter to cut the curved sheets of transparent plastic. Organizer Adam Smith shares that he's already used Awesome grant funds to purchase bulk material and two more 3-D printers, which will be donated to maker groups or schools when they're no longer needed to produce face shields. Thanks to Adam and his collaborators for all they're doing to keep healthcare workers safe during this crisis.

04/09/2020

Are you doing something awesome to support your community during the COVID-19 crisis? Would $1,000 help to get it started or keep it going?

Then you should fill out this simple application for the Ann Arbor Awesome Foundation's monthly $1,000 mini-grant right now.

Forwarding the interest of Awesome in the universe, $1,000 at a time.

04/09/2020

Congratulations to our new grantee, MI Voz! The project by U-M grad Mayela Rodriguez offers programming designed to ask Latinx community members the question "What is my political power?" It started as a series of workshops for participants to make cartoneras – cardboard-bound books of their original work. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the project has pivoted to produce an online cartonera called "Stay Home, Stay Woke." You can read the first issue right here: https://www.flipsnack.com/mivoz/stay-home-stay-woke-1/full-view.html

Thanks for being awesome, Mayela!

Flipsnack is a digital catalog maker that makes it easy to create, publish and share html5 flipbooks. Upload a PDF or design from scratch flyers, magazines, books and more. Author: Mayela Rodriguez, Catalog: Issue 1, Published: Mar 27, 2020

02/13/2020

Our latest $1,000 mini-grant went to Erin Falker-Obichigha of The Carr Center, who recently facilitated Rule of Three, a two-day African dance workshop for youth and adults. The workshop featured three master teachers in African dance. With the help of Awesome Foundation funds, subsidized workshop registrations were offered to kids ages 8-17. Congrats and thanks for the awesome work you're doing, Erin!

01/06/2020

Our latest $1,000 mini-grant went to Ferndale-based Affirmations to upgrade their youth drop-in center! Here we are presenting the grant funds to Ian Unger from Affirmations.

Ian shares the following:

"Many of the youth that come to Affirmations come from low-income households or are challenged by homelessness, and almost all the youth identify as LGBTQ. These youth come to Affirmations as a place to call home and to find their families of choice. They deserve to have services offered to them that they may not be able to find outside of our doors. Therefore, it is so important that we fix what is broken within the space, replace what is worn out, and really revitalize everything.

We also are looking at moving the drop-in space to a bigger area within the Center over the next year, and because of this, we want to make it a new and exciting experience, and we hope to have it open for more days and more hours within the new drop-in room, because staffing will be more readily available."