Q&A with December 2012 grantee The Better Bombshell

The Better Bombshell is a forthcoming book that asks writers and artists to answer a simple question: Who is the better bombshell? This nonprofit literary and art project was the recipient of our December 2012 grant.

According to the forthcoming anthology’s website, “The project is centered around a simple void in modern media: the lack of positive, multidimensional female role models. Who do today’s young women admire? Who do today’s men covet? What earns our envy and our celebration, our lust and our love? [...] In a sharp contrast to the popular media, we’re asking some of the best creative, intellectual, and artistic minds of our era to do what they do best: provide new insights into the questions that most of us forget to ask.”

1. What was the impetus for this project? Where did you get the idea and how did it evolve?

The project actually started with a conversation about the similarities and differences between written and visual art.  We’re fascinated by the different ways that people tell stories, and there’s this misconception that writers and artists have some mysterious and intangible process of inquiry and incubation. We wanted to demystify that, so we brainstormed about ways that we might encourage and nurture an accessible dialogue between writers and artists. Before we came up with the specific subject matter, we knew that we wanted to put together a collaborative book.

Once we had that concept in mind, we started chewing on specific themes for the anthology. Eventually we put together a handful of concepts and sent them out to our friends and family in an email to ask for feedback. Lots of people sent their thoughts, but the thing that fascinated us about the response to the “better bombshell” idea was that it got lots of thumbs-ups – and an equal number of thumbs-downs.  If you get fifty positive responses and fifty negative responses, that information is a lot more powerful that a hundred halfhearted people saying “Sure.”

2. Can you share some of your learnings from the project? 

Honestly, it’s been a steep learning curve. If we’d had any idea how big an undertaking this would be – fundraising, editing, self-publishing, learning how to promote a book, fostering relationships with bookstore and libraries – we would have been immobilized by fear. But we didn’t know any better, so we sprinted into the fire.  In retrospect, I’m grateful for that bold naivety.

We’ve also learned – in ways that we’ll never forget – how valuable an artistic community can be. We’ve asked for every possible favor from everybody we know, and the response has been so encouraging that I’m humbled to tears. I was shy about asking for anything, but people are popping up out of the woodwork to ask how they can help this dream come true. Whenever we need something – whether it’s friends to wash dishes at fundraisers or just a late-night pep talk from a fellow writer who knows how mind-numbing book layout can be – the community rises up around us. We’ve always taken that fellowship seriously, but after this experience, we count that community as a family. We’re counting the days until we can give back – and we’re planning to become Awesome Foundation trustees as soon as we can!

3. What’s the reception to the idea been like?

We’ve had an overwhelmingly positive reaction to the project, which has been really inspiring.  The book will be released on February 14, and it’ll be fun to actually get to share the results of all the work we’ve put in!

We’re learning that there might be some hard questions, as there are in any project that gets some press attention. But we welcome those questions, because our goal has always been to encourage discussion.

4. As if self-publishing a book featuring dozens of contributors wasn’t enough, we hear you’re planning a book tour/road trip. Can you tell us more about that?

We’ve got lots of exciting events coming up! The book will be released at a our launch party on February 14 at the Seattle Art Museum’s Sculpture Park – we’re planning a big swanky black-tie event with readings by the writers and viewings of all the original artwork. That weekend we’ll be taking the book to a local community college, the Washington State women’s prison, and the Elliott Bay Bookstore.  On February 17, we’re working with the Foundation For Sex Positive Culture to present a discussion panel with the artists at the EM Fine Art Gallery.

After that big launch weekend, we’re planning to take the book to the Association of Writers & Publishers (AWP) Conference in Boston during the first week of March.  Once we’ve gotten back from Boston, we’ll do some laundry, shave our legs, and take the book on a West Coast tour.  It’ll literally be us in a U-Haul, driving from Tijuana to Bellingham. We’re hoping to hit all the public libraries, back-room bars, and quirky little independent bookstores.  We’re also planning book tours on the East Coast and in Alaska, so stay tuned for more exciting plans!

The book can be pre-ordered from thebetterbombshell.com.

Eli wants to revolutionize the mechanic industry.  Inspired by a strong social justice background, he hopes to build a space where people can not only get their car fixed, but also learn something along the way to become more knowledgeable about their vehicles.  We’ve all heard horror stories of car mechanics, and Eli has personally seen customers taken advantage of.  “I worked at a dealership for years and found the industry to be kind of crappy.  I knew I had to leave or go do my own thing.”  And it’s not necessarily that mechanics are bad people.  For example, Eli told me that most dealerships pay on a per-job basis.  If you know that you’ll be paid $400 no matter how long it takes, that gives you an incentive to take shortcuts and finish as quickly as possible — potentially at the cost of doing a good job.

One example of a class Eli wants to offer is a basic training course for new drivers.  For most teenagers learning to drive, parents and instructors are focused on how to drive the car, not how to take care of it.  This can leave people open to being taken advantage of, especially youth or women.  If you don’t know the basics of maintaining your car and a mechanic tells you to get your brake fluid changed every 5000 miles, you might not realize that you don’t actually need that level of service.  Similarly, some basic tasks or diagnosis can be done by drivers themselves without needing a mechanic, if they’re armed with some basic knowledge.  You might not be able to learn enough to fix your car, but you could at least learn enough so that when you’re stranded on the side of the road, you can tell whether it’s safe to continue on to a garage on your own instead of needing a tow truck.

Eli’s shop has been open since January but there just hasn’t been the time or money to start putting together materials for classes yet.  This is where the money from the Awesome Foundation will help out.  The shop is all set to serve as a space for learning, but the Awesome Foundation grant will help with all the little things that make a classroom run — visual aides, take home materials, guides for people to keep in their car, something they can use as a reference.  I think I speak for all the trustees when I say that we’re extremely excited to see what Eli can put together and we can’t wait to attend the first course — even those of us who don’t own a car!  We hope this becomes something that the entire community can use and benefit from and we look forward to seeing what Eli can build.

https://www.facebook.com/events/483058011714371/

Tom, our 10th grantee, isn’t actually an artist. He’s a Software Engineer who wanted to get to know his wider neighbors better. As he said in his application, “I don’t really know my neighbors and that’s a problem. I don’t mean the people that live across the hall or in the building next door, but rather neighbors in the greater Capitol Hill neighborhood. I think that this is a problem for most of the people that live in cities and I want to help fix it.”

Rather than shrugging his shoulders, inviting his friends over, or throwing a potluck, he decided the way to bring people together was by doing an art project.  He wanted to paint a community paint-by-number mural in Capitol Hill that would encourage anyone walking by to see that they could contribute, and meet some new people!

Tom reached out to UrbanArtworks where he connected with Kathleen Warren, a project coordinator, and Mark O’Connell, a local artist. Mark came up with a design to focus on the community, and the three proposed it to the Capitol Club.

With everyone on the same page, we’ll be painting over this graffiti this weekend. We hope to see you there!

The Capitol Club Wall: Covered in Graffiti

Don’t rewrite someone else’s life, make your own. We come from somewhere different, embrace it and be one of a kind, not a repeat.

Wouldn’t you feel better?

We imagine Robb , our 13th grantee, has had one of these days before- like the first time he applied to the Awesome Foundation and didn’t receive a grant. Luckily, he reapplied this October and was selected. As you might have guessed from the title, his project is  ”Postcards from Farr Away”. The project is simple: people write genuine messages on postcards, and then mails the cards to complete strangers! What started out as just Robb and some friends has grown dramatically over the past year as people started receiving the postcards and deciding to get involved in the project. It’s easy for anyone who gets a card to find more, or even send cards from the Postcards from Farr Away Website.

One of the most common questions for Robb is “how do you get the addresses?” We asked him about it, and he selects the addresses from the phonebook, and from a submission feature on the project’s website. You, too, can go request a postcard be sent to someone you care about. Postcards are now being sent globally, in addition to in the United States!

The role of the Awesome Foundation Grant is to help with something he’s been trying to do for a while – get financing to help make the project more sustainable over time, and possibly self sustaining by selling apparel (like t-shirts) to support the project. He might also put together a book of the postcards, or about the experience. He’s also looking to connect to schools to hold workshops for students to help write postcards.

Choosing an Awesome Seattle grantee can be tough. But every winning project elicits the same reaction in the trustees: “Woah, that’s awesome!” Our September grantee, the Graffiti Defense Coalition (GDC) Street Art Sticker Vending Machine, is no exception, and we’re tremendously excited to see it develop a loyal following on the streets of Seattle.
The “nomadic” sticker Machine will hop from neighborhood art walks to galleries and events around Seattle. By distributing its unique street art stickers the Machine will spread the GDC’s message about public art and street art, and be self-sustaining while subsidizing the GDC’s other street art education efforts.

The GDC’s Golda Hall is collaborating with a diverse array of local artists to ensure the Machine is always stocked with awesome sticker designs for the Machine. When each limited run of stickers is distributed, new designs will be created for the machine, so it will continue to contribute to the vibrancy of Seattle street art. The Machine will become the physical and online persona of the GDC to invite everyone to interact with, contribute to, and promote street art.

Other projects that the GDC is developing which the Machine will promote and support include a curriculum for youth to better understand the difference between vandalism and street art. For the group’s largest effort yet, GDC’s Stunning Seattle is a large scale mural event coming in 2013, joining local property owners and local/international mural artists to beautify the empty walls in Seattle. Awesome Seattle is proud to help kick off these exciting, innovative projects with our grant.

If you’re as excited as we are to spread public art in Seattle – and get some sweet stickers – check out the GDC’s website, Facebook, or Twitter!

Dodgeball Seattle wants to build a portable dodgeball court and bring the game to other Seattle neighborhoods. We’re excited to announce our grant to help them do just that.

Designing a portable court that can survive the punishment of regular games requires some experimental engineering work. The team has already built some prototypes that you can watch getting some live fire testing here.

When the court is ready for its debut, we’ll post an announcement on our Twitter and Facebook pages. In the meantime, you can get some practice in at Cal Anderson in Capitol Hill and Loyal Heights in Ballard – check out Seattle Dodgeball’s website for more info.

In other words, instead of coming to a museum to look at curated artifacts, Pop-Up Museum visitors bring their own items and share the stories behind them. The end result isn’t much like a conventional art or history museum (it’s more like show and tell for grownups), but it is pretty Awesome.

Pop-Up Museums range from light-hearted reminiscing to serious, heart-felt discussions. They bring strangers together to talk about adoption, share handmade artifacts, tell their life stories, and more. The Pop-Up Museums that Michelle has run have been a huge hit, and people have started asking how they can run their own Pop-Up Museum. Since each instance of the museum only requires a few hours, a common space, and participants, it’s not hard to replicate successfully.

So far, everything Pop-Up has run on Michelle’s own blood, sweat, tears, and money. We’re jumping in to help with that last bit – with our grant money, Michelle can invest in more PR and work with the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History to put together mailable Pop-Up Museum kits to share with anyone interested in running their own museum.

Sarah Bergmann, the program’s founder, had this to say: “One third of our food supply relies on pollination, and we depend on honeybees to pollinate our crops, but honeybees have been declining precipitously in recent years. Thousands of different pollinators such as native bees (most of which, unlike the European honeybee, don’t live in social colonies) and butterflies pollinate 90% of the world’s flowering plants, but their populations are also declining due to shrinking habitats and pesticide use. The Pollinator Pathway aims to integrate food and habitat for pollinators into the city grid, by replacing grass in planting strips with native pollinator-focused gardens”.

Sarah was also quite eager to have others pitch in and get involved. For those looking to get into gardening, but live in an apartment without a yard, you can become a “Garden Adopter” for the Pollinator Pathway. The commitment is for 8 months and you help care for one small garden on a weekly basis. Additionally, you can join a work party to help build up new gardens. There are 8 slated for this coming year and it’s sure to be a good time.

Lastly, the Pollinator Pathway is seeking ongoing financial contributions to continue to build out this ambitious green project. We’re thrilled to join a list of ongoing sponsors to bring such a fantastic project to Seattle.

To contact Sarah about volunteer opportunities, email her at
volunteer@pollinatorpathway.com or visit
pollinatorpathway.com for more information.

She’s been working with students at the University of Washington for the last 2 years, “building functional engineers one blinky LED at a time”. They’ve put together 3D printers, messed around (that’s the technical term) with Arduinos, and are embarking on an HTML5/javascript adventure. The result of all this is a group of students who are excited to change the world and credit Hackademia for their shift in perspective.

In addition to funding hardware for the Hackademia lab (which Beth has been personally supplying), our grant will also go towards a set of workshops aimed at reaching out to underengaged communities. The ideal end result? A chain reaction of enthusiasm, empowerment, and (of course) awesome projects!

Scarleteen staff created a prototype to hold condoms, dental dams, lube, birth control, gloves, and cleansing cloths that could easily be sewn together by the teens themselves and other volunteers. The grant will be used to provide materials for the kits as well as for printing educational materials included in the kit. This kit would works hand in hand with the education Scarleteen already provides at the center as well as other locations the Seattle Area. Teens that receive the kit will also get a copy of the book “S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College” written by Scarleteen founder Heather Corinna.  We’re super excited that by using the grant, they’ll be able to produce 50+ kits to distribute by the end of 2012, and scale from there.  We also just learned that Trojan donated several cases of condoms for these kits so our grant is already inspiring others to join in on this project!

If you’d like to know more about Scarleteen check out their web site at www.scarleteen.com or check out this cool video made by one of Scarleteen users.