Q & A with our winner, Tara Muldoon of F-You, the Forgiveness Project:

1) Congratulations! What’s your project all about?

Thank-you so much for all you and Toronto Awesome do! F-You: The Forgiveness Project is a community-based organization that asks what forgiveness looks like in a variety of scenarios and experiences. We run panels, workshops and groups on the idea of forgiveness. Sometimes we work around a specific issue such as gang violence, relationships, addiction, topics around sex, etc.

We are just over two years old and run by a team of youth/young adults from a variety of backgrounds.

2) Forgiving someone isn’t an easy thing to do; it can be very emotional. Do people sometimes cry at your events?

Our events can provoke a variety of emotions including tears, anger and everything else under the sun. It’s all welcome and understood.

3) I’d like to talk about forgiveness, or I’d like to volunteer. How can I get in touch with you, and when is your next event?

We would love to hear from you! TMuldoon at fyouproject.com is my email address and our twitter is @projectfword.

We have monthly – sometimes weekly – events across the city and the next one is April 9th at the Jane+Finch mall.

Big Brother Bike Thief GPS Tracker: The Big Brother Bike Thief GPS Tracker (working title) aim to help either mitigate theft or increase your likelihood of recovery. The aim is to produce a device that you can install inside your bike frame that a user can arm via a keyfob. If the device, when armed, senses vibrations for 10 seconds assumes the bike to be stolen and immediately communicates with the Big Brother website’s API with location data and informs the cyclist via text message that their bike has been stolen.

Green Rocket: Mapping cheap TTC-accessible produce: Green Rocket (TTC’s “red rocket” + green grocers; also, it’s what British people call arugula!) is a map of low-cost fruit & vegetable markets within walking distance of Toronto subway stations.

The Salaam Scrapbook Project: We are a volunteer-based organization providing a safe forum at the 519 Community Centre for queer-identified Muslims across the GTA. Many live in fear, face rejection, and risk violent reactions from family & peers. This group works to combat Islamophobia and homophobia, whether internalized or in interactions with others. In the spirit of celebrating these courageous men and women who have joined Salaam, we would like to compile an anthology of their art works: photography, poetry, personal essays, and other submissions. Ideally, the anthology would be made available in both hard-paper and digital formats.

Sage Rising: Sage Rising is an urban herb and herbal product business that cultivates in backyard micro-farms in the heart of Toronto. The company provides its customers with ethical & healthy organically-grown culinary herbs, tea herbs, herbal condiments & sauces, & herbal body products produced on a small-scale, community-based urban farm. Sage Rising’s products are marketed to restaurants, food co-operatives, caterers, & individuals who value local, sustainable, & flavour-rich foods.

F-You: The Forgiveness Project: Our team believes that our peer group (18-35 year olds) are constantly surrounded by images and ideas of conflict. Because conflict comes in so many forms – from gang violence to bullying – we created a project that inspires dialogue about what forgiveness means and looks like. We are heartbroken by growing violence rates in the GTA, as many of our team members have lost friends and family to gun violence. As a way of healing, we started a small discussion group about turning trauma into a positive project. We are a group of young people who see the concept of forgiveness as a tangible and attainable way of seeing results, with the ultimate goal of seeing violence rates lowered. To date, we have held 19 events attracting more than 2,200 attendees, the majority of whom have been youth.

Hope to see you at the event!

1) Congratulations! What’s your project all about?

We run a service called Teen Legal Helpline (https://www.teenlegalhelpline.org). It’s a website where teens can ask their most pressing legal questions and get answers from experienced lawyers. We launched a week ago.

2) Legal help can be really complicated. Do you anticipate that some users of your site will require assistance beyond email and telephone conversations?

One of the hardest things about having a legal problem is that you don’t know what to do. That’s what we’re trying to solve for teens. As you correctly point out, some situations require more involvement than that. Our lawyers understand that referring teens to good help is as important as giving good initial advice.

3) How can people get in contact with you if they want to help out?

Shoot me a note at matt at teenlegalhelpline.org. I’d love to hear from you.

Feel free to share these images and link back to Awesome Foundation Toronto. =)

Submit your awesome idea for a chance at $1,000 in a paper bag – deadline March 15!

Sign up at awesomejan2013.eventbrite.ca . See you there!

Five groups will be pitching us on the 31st:

Train of Thought

Well you see what we do is, we take a bunch of people who voluntarily come with us onto the subway trains and break down social barriers and spread positive messages of love & unity. A wide range of people come out, but the two main groups of people are performing artists and non performing artists. As you can see, everyone is still considered an artist, unity, right?

Now, for those riding with us as performing artists, if they have a “piece” (poetry/singing/rap/etc…) or instrument, or dance, prepared to share, they are encouraged to be a part of the flash portion of the project. This is where the artist surprises the riders with their piece as an act of spontaneous expression.

For the non performing artists, they are also encouraged to take part in the social barrier breaking aspect of the project, to their own discretion. To help break the ice between the riders and artists, we provide the artists with post it notes & hand written signs asking riders “for a simple favour?” & then as you flip the card, on the back all you ask is for a smile: =).

Another social barrier ice breaker we get non performing artists to take part in is our “Thought Board”. Riders are asked to sign our “thought board” with what ever thought they may have in mind at the moment positive//negative. A great way for riders to write other riders positive words of encouragement, or a great way for them to vent out what may be troubling their mind.

All of these random expressions of love, and acts of art are geared to connecting humans during what normally would be an autonomous part of their day in a creative, spontaneous, and harmonious way. Only art can turn an idea so crazy into something understandable, because it gives someone standing from a distance or a stranger something they can resonate with deeply.

Super furniture at Rear View Artspace

Rear View Art-space, founded by Jennifer Davis and Su-Ying Lee, is an atypical site for art aimed at wanderers, the curious, the adventurous, and the lost. Located in an unassuming Toronto laneway (behind Lee’s home), in a residential neighbourhood, the architecture of this “gallery” is comprised of fences, garages and pavement. In this quirky urban space, artists are challenged to think outside the white-walled gallery and, instead, create projects that will be encountered by “patrons” passing in the street. These projects, found in our own backyard, help us imagine new and crazy ways of inhabiting our everyday environment. Rear View Art-space is a mini-creative-laboratory where propositions are put forth about how our city can be re-shaped with new vision.

Communication networks, happenstance or serendipity draw visitors to Rear View Art-space for unexpected encounters, a detour from the everyday and food for thought. Built on the ethos of DIY and “if you build it, they will come”, Davis and Lee create opportunity from their abundance of creative vision in an economy of limited physical and financial resources. Rear View Art-space will be a continuing project that presents one exhibition per season.

Super Furniture is the inaugural exhibition of Rear View Art-space, confirmed to launch the summer of 2013. This cartoonish and whimsical installation by architect and graphic novelist, Jimenez Lai, is conceived of as “a building that is too small and furniture that is too big.” The project, designed especially for the laneway site, offers visitors the opportunity to inhabit windows of a life-sized comic book page. The project revives the eternal fascination of chidhood fort building, club founding and playing out of sight of ‘grown ups’. Super Furniture is a novel proposition for how we might live and socialize in the unique, but often overlooked, spaces of Toronto.

Teen Legal Helpline

Access to justice in Canada is in a state of crisis. The Chief Justice has spoken publicly about the inability of most Canadians to afford counsel. The Canadian Bar Association finds high proportions of people navigate legal proceedings on their own because of the failure of legal aid. Yet, in 2010 more than 150,000 youth dealt with the criminal legal system — many alone, as teens and social workers rarely receive reliable advice. Without change, these teens will be lost in the legal system.

We help teens by offering free and confidential legal advice through our website atwww.teenlegalhelpline.org. According to experts, the largest unmet access to justice need is diagnosing and explaining legal situations, and that is what Teen Legal Helpline does.

Teen Legal Helpline is the first service of its kind to use technology to improve access to justice. Attempts to alleviate the problem in Canada have so far depended on legal clinics that provide free or low cost legal services only to indigent clients. These almost always have physical locations, depend on public funding (which is on the verge of collapse), and cannot scale. Instead of relying on the service models of physical clinics, we leverage a network of volunteer lawyers across the country to provide teens with specific answers to their legal questions. We can do this because our platform is designed to solve the largest barrier to lawyer volunteerism: the inability to predict availability or capacity. Our service lets lawyers answer discrete questions at their convenience and directly from their inbox, without disrupting how they currently work. Our technology is built to handle very large volumes of questions, so we can scale to match the size of the problem we are tackling.

Love takes the worry out of being close

My project is part of this year’s HATCH residency at Harbourfront. It is a queer and Trans re-imagining of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s infamous Bed-ins which protested the Vietnam War. Like their actions, it will be part love-fest, part political act.

In “love takes the worry out of being close” I am putting queer and trans lover/activist teams in a big bed – a different team each day of the residency week. These teams will invite audiences into their bed to talk about different political issues. From Gay Marriage to Idle No More, they will discuss, facilitate and encourage a public, warm and fuzzy conversation that is centred around non-violence and collective mobilization. There will be 4 teams of 2 -3 people each.

We will be doing 8 workshops in February and March to prepare for this experience. Though they will all have experience as facilitators in political context, many won’t be seasoned performance artists. The workshops will be opportunities to flush out how to talk about their chosen issues in an art context, and offer a number of tools for non-violent facilitation when it comes to conversation.

The performances will run from April 8 – 13, 2013 at Harbourfront’s Studio Theatre. Audiences will encounter the lover/activists in white pajamas and surrounded by beautiful white flowers, just like John and Yoko. They will invite you and you and you into their comfy room, which will feel like a hotel room. Together, you will explore the issues they are passionate about with laughter, conversation, education and love. On the final day, we will show documentation from the week, and get feedback from the audience on their thoughts and experiences of the work.

We will take the whole thing to Montreal, where we’ll do it in the REAL hotel rooms that John and Yoko used at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel (1738, 1740, 1742 and 1744) back in late May and early June, 1969. For that part of the project, I am applying to the Canada Council’s Inter-Arts Office.

The Davisville Community Outdoor Learning Garden

The Eco Comittee has five main goals: 1. To foster leadership and teamwork; 2. To reduce our impact on the environment; 3. To care for and create vibrant school grounds; 4. To improve student achievement through ecological literacy; and, 5. To contribute to healthy, safe and caring communities.

To further achieve these goals, the Davisville Eco-Committee is creating the Davisville Community Outdoor Learning Garden. The Garden will be a vibrant education and recreation space for students, educators and community members to engage in hands-on learning activities, to socialize and to play. Working with students and the greater community our plan includes the installation for extra seating, a free community library, environmentally sensitive play areas, and a small scale greenhouse.

The learning and social hub will include natural rock seating, an outdoor chalkboard and ecological learning stations placed throughout the garden. The play areas will enhance creative play, promoting awareness and sensitivity about our local environment. To promote literacy and the love of reading we will install two free community book boxes. These free libraries will be a place where both children and adults can come to exchange books and, therefore, create a cycle of people returning the garden again and again. The greenhouse will be a year round living laboratory for our community to learn, explore and grow. The greenhouse will be a space to conduct experiments, learn about natural life cycles and even grow food for the school snack program!

The Davisville community is a high density urban area and many residents have limited access to natural green space to relax, play and explore. As we become increasingly urbanised, we becoming increasingly alienated from our natural environment. The Garden provides this natural space while fostering an increased sense of belonging, engagement and stewardship.

Sign up at awesomejan2013.eventbrite.ca . See you there!

Missed the deadline for this round? No worries, you can still submit your awesome idea for the February grant. Next deadline: February 15.

Need more time? We’d love to hear from you next month!

Here are the sketchnotes from tonight’s pitches. Click on the image for a larger version.

Congratulations to Lovecraft TO, the cigarette vending machine turned art vending machine. Good luck with your project!

Got an awesome idea and want to pitch us for your chance at the loot? Head on over to the Awesome Foundation Application, and fill in your 250 words! Our cutoff deadline each month is the 15th, so if you’d like $1000 to make that robot Santa Claus you’ve always dreamed of, now’s the time to get your submission in!