FAQ

AWB does not award grants for payments to individuals, travel expenses (food, travel, lodging, etc), or religious-affiliated projects, and usually declines grant requests from large non-profits with substantial budgets or for-profit projects. While the AWB program supports all creative and zany ideas, more than 80% of our grants in the past year have gone to women-led initiatives and priority is given to projects that overlap with the Harnisch Foundation focus areas such as media activism, leadership development, and intersectionality (e.g. How does your project increase representation and inclusion in age, class, race, gender, sexuality, religion and/or ability?).

There’s only one way: You must submit an electronic application through our Awesome Without Borders chapter website. Apply here. Note: Make sure that the Awesome Without Borders chapter is selected in the drop-down menu. The application is short and to-the-point, and will allow our team of Awesome Trustees to review your materials and vote. If it is determined from the application that the request meets a unanimous vote from Awesome Without Borders’ team, the applicant will be notified typically within two months. Note: The grant is for $1,000 USD only and is a one-time grant.

If your grant is selected, the exact application you submitted will be made public to all on the Awesome Foundation website. Please let us know if any information included is confidential or if significant details may have changed since the time of your application. We prepare a description of the grant for this website based on your application and publicly available information, and will share for your factual review prior to publishing.

There are no deadlines for Awesome Without Borders as we are on a rolling deadline. Our promise is to review applications and award grants as fast as we can! With our Awesome Without Borders initiative, we will be awarding $1,000 USD a week. Our intention is to notify all applicants, but here’s our disclaimer: sometimes we have more applications than we can process to give you a timely response. To view the application, click here.

It is our intention to process and respond to applications as soon as possible, however, we usually have more applications than we can process. If it’s been more than two months since you submitted your application through the Awesome Without Borders application and you haven’t heard from us, you may inquire by email to determine the status of your request. Please contact our Trustee, Jenny Raymond ([email protected]) via email only.

Heck yeah! Our Awesome Without Borders initiative will not assess the basis of the application on whether or not you or your project are recognized as a nonprofit or 501c3 or are based in the USA or internationally. Awards to those who are outside of the USA and/or not 501c3 organizations will come from AWB chapter founder’s private funds and NOT from The Harnisch Foundation. It’s that simple.

An electronic application, found here, is required and the only way to submit a request. Note: Make sure that the Awesome Without Borders chapter is selected in the drop-down menu. No hard copy applications will be accepted.

With our Awesome Without Borders initiative, you are NOT REQUIRED to submit financial statements, because we are not considering 501c3 status exclusively as the starting point for assessing your project’s Awesome Quotient!

We have a team of Awesome Trustees who review the applications, and we try to get to as many as we can each week. We must have unanimous consent for a grant to be awarded. We see such a variety of applications covering so many amazing ideas, we do our best to give a thorough review before any voting takes place. Therefore, it is unlikely the same project will be considered for funding if the application is not significantly altered when submitted again. There is no rule about how long you need to wait. Please do not submit more than two times, as we have hundreds of grants to review, and need to give everyone the same thoughtful review process!