We <3 AwesomeBoulder


by Miles Matthias

As if you weren't already aware, Boulder is freaking awesome. So awesome, that there's a group of amazing people working to make Boulder even awesome-er and we at dojo4 help them any way we can.

Awesome Boulder is the local chapter of the Awesome Foundation, which grants $1,000 a month to local projects working to improve the community in some way. AwesomeBoulder has been running for 25 months and funded 25 projects for a total of $25,000 given out to local projects. You can see the full list of funded projects on their chapter page.

Dojo4 believes in this organization, so we help out by acting on their board of trustees, making a monthly monetary donation, and hosting all of their events and meetings at our office. We also improved their website at awesomeboulder.org pro-bono. Their site started as a simple landing page with an explanation and a link to apply at the Awesome Foundation's website.

The page did a good job of explaining the process of getting funded, but a major administrative challenge was reminding each donor to write a check each month to Awesome Boulder. So we turned their landing page into a full Rails app so that they could allow their donors to automatically make their contribution each month. This change also allows them to build and publish a blog, and have flexibility over their application process should they want to change it in the future.

We're looking forward to seeing what awesome projects they support next!