Thursday, April 24, 2014

Announcing our 3rd Anniversary Awesome Calgary Finalists!



Valentine’s Day Balloon Give-Aways, Speed Gaming 2.0, ‘Meat-Filled’ Zebra Piñata Parties and Cardboard Fort Days. It’s all been leading up to this: The re-launch of Awesome Calgary and our 3rd Anniversary Pitch ’n Party!

After an extended hiatus, we’re re-launching our Awesome Foundation chapter with a new mandate and vision:

We’ll continue to enable awesome in the community through our micro-granting program and facilitating connections within the community to help applicants execute their Awesome Ideas just as before, but we’re vowing to do more awesome in the community ourselves.

For those that’ve participated in our previous events this year as listed above (all inspired by projects that have received grants from AF chapters in other cities; yep, these are the sorts of things that we can also fund so if you feel that you can do better, submit your idea for consideration!), you will have already gotten a taste of the sort of awesomeness that we want to unleash on the city throughout 2014 and beyond, with the help of some fantastic community partners.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg! From Awesome Workshops that’ll teach you how to do Awesome Things, to a Speaker Series that’ll inspire you to do Awesome Acts yourselves, to possibly even an Awesome Concert Series that’ll promote some wicked-cool grassroots talent or talent you may never have heard about, we have a full slate and variety of different events and activities planned and in the works for throughout the year that are designed to help build community, make the city more vibrant and to showcase some awesome things, but most importantly, geared to help YOU do awesome things yourselves.

Many things are brewing in the background right now programming wise, so stay tuned over the coming months (sign up for our newsletter to make sure you don't miss a thing!) as we get ready to announce them!

In the meantime, we still have our 3rd Anniversary Thousand Dollar Thursday to get through tonight. In keeping with the theme of ‘3’s’ today, we’ve decided to go with a Top3 instead of a Top4, just for this month to change things up. Will we ever emulate Awesome Edmonton and go with a Top5 one month? Maybe. Stay tuned! Variety is the spice of life, after all.

For now, here are your Top3 Finalists for April 2014:

  1. Rainbow Connection Dome by Stephanie Orr, Janelle Pansky and Lisa Sudeikat:  “Creating a beautiful dome to showcase the Rainbow Connections summer art show.”
  2. Mealshare by Jeremy Bryant:   “Help Mealshare equip our street teams with awesome materials to help spread the word this summer.”
  3. Acts of Fabulousness by Yiorgos Boudouris:  “Chronicle the individual stories of gender and sexual minority youth throughout Calgary.”


We recognize that our event coincides with Day 1 of the Calgary Expo, and as we’re big fans of that event ourselves, we’ll try our best to keep things short and sweet for this one so people can take off and participate in those other festivities. But don’t worry; we have plans to throw a BIG celebration in honour of our Third Anniversary at a future date, along with the help of some fantastic community partners and other like-minded individuals and groups. So stay tuned for that! (Hint: It too may involve a piñata, among some other things)

In the meantime, here’s a bit of a look back at some of the cool things we’ve been able to pull off in the city over the last few years:


This video was created in honour of the first-ever Awesome Day in Canada last year on June 21, where Canadian Awesome Foundation chapters from coast-to-coast (and even a handful of chapters from the US as part of a Worldwide Day of Awesome that Canada had hosted) were invited to participate by doing something public facing in their communities. Coordinated from right here in Calgary, we had various AF chapters awarding grants, holding ‘Unlimited’ Picnics, giving away balloons and throwing frisbees in a park, just to name a few of the things.

We were originally supposed to do a big giveaway throughout the day downtown ending with a Pitch Night in partnership with the Calgary Public Library, but the floods last year threw those plans out the window. Instead, we held a Relaxation Station in support of the community of Mission where we offered amenities such as free cell phone charging, massages and a place to sit in the shade for flood evacuees and volunteers. It was a huge success and the inspiration for our new direction this year.

We hope you can join us tonight for our 3rd Anniversary event in support of three fantastic ideas, and even if you can’t, we definitely hope that you’ll join us at one of the many wacky events we have in store throughout the year. It’ll be…Awesome!

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