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Christina Xu is the founding director of the Institute on Higher Awesome Studies, an organization dedicated to nurturing small awesome ideas around the world; she also serves as a trustee on the Boston chapter of the Awesome Foundation. By day, she is employee #1 at Breadpig, an uncorporation that publishes webcomics and funnels the goodwill of geeks worldwide towards worthy causes.

The Awesome Foundation movement was started in Boston in 2008, when a group of 10 acquaintances decided to give away $1000 of their own pooled money every month to awesome projects and individuals, no strings attached. They called it "the MacArthur for micro-flashes of brilliance". Spreading mostly by word of mouth, there are now 25 Awesome Foundation chapters on 4 continents with no formal centralized organization. The Institute on Higher Awesome Studies (IHAS) was founded to promote the Awesome Foundation model within a development and revitalization context. In June 2011, IHAS received a grant from the Knight Foundation to start Awesome Foundations focused on journalism and civic media; the pilot chapter is called Awesome News Taskforce: Detroit.