Introducing the Blackbird Protostars

Artists, engineers, scientists, musicians, egyptologists, toy makers, poets, theatre-makers and more.

We went to the mountain, we walked on the shore. We looked high, we looked low. We searched in every nook and cranny. And we found them — our future iconic creators, thinkers and inventors. The Blackbird Protostars.

Our future leaders are not just sitting in a university lecture hall or doing an internship at an investment bank. The next generation is also breaking down complex issues through rap on TikTok, or peering through a camera lens, sitting at a piano composing, or leaning over a workbench, painting, writing, programming. Their passions are as diverse as they are dynamic and they will be the ones to solve the greatest challenges we face tomorrow.

So a few months ago, we opened up applications for our first-ever grant program. The framework was simple - through the Blackbird Foundation, provide grants of $1,000 for passion projects based in Australia and New Zealand.

These are the earliest cheques Blackbird has ever cut and in the future, hopefully, we can go earlier.

Our objective was to find beautiful examples of creativity, supercharge their work through funding and community building, and use their stories to inspire more young people.

We received 298 incredible applications running wide and deep on the creative spectrum: engineers, poets, Egyptologists, scientists, toy makers, artists and activists. We funding 27 of them and we're calling them Protostars.

The program has already begun. We are all building in public - myself included. Protostars will be sharing weekly updates, and I will be sharing those across our channels. To follow along, hit the Blackbird Foundation on Twitter, Instagram and subscribe to this Substack. Or follow me direct on Twitter.

Without further delay, please meet the first-ever cohort of Blackbird Protostars.

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Sam Johnson is making a real-physics-solar-simulator in which players can create stars, planets and moons based on elements from the periodic table.

Sam is a simulation programmer, and he is creating a real-physics solar simulation in which people can create stars, planets, and moons based on elements from the periodic table. Kind of like Sim City but for Solar Systems.

Tash Atkins is an opera singer exploring algorithmic electronic music called Algorave.

Tash is an opera singer, composer and sound artist exploring a new practice, combining technology and classical music. She creates coded music, also known as Algorave, to develop cutting-edge and experimental opera performances. Google Algorave and you’ll fast fall down a rabbit hole. Start with this 12-minute video from Resident Advisor.

Joanne Amarisa is creating a course that introduces women to data visualisation and creative code.

Joanna is creating an education initiative and community that introduces women to data visualisation and creative code. It is an online course in the form of a guided project, where students learn how to build a data-driven virtual garden, using only text messages with a loved one. As a test, Joanna made a beautiful project called "A Garden of my Mothers Concerns" - it's an incredible piece of work that maps Whatsapp messages with her mother.

Ginger-Rose Harrington is translating an ancient text from an Egyptian Solar Cult. Follow on Twitter or Linkedin

The ancient Hymns to Amun-Re from papyrus Chester Beatty IV form a fascinating theological treatise on the Egyptian Solar Cult. However, their English translation has not been revised for over 50 years! During this time, Egyptologists’ understanding of the Hieroglyphic Egyptian language has undergone considerable development. Her passion project seeks to obtain photos of this papyrus from the British Museum, from which she will re-translate the text into English. This will culminate in a scholarly publication that will include pictures of the actual document for the first time ever.

Sophia Lin is working in a team to build a detumbling system for a Cube Satelite.

🛰️ ACRUX-2 is a student team in the Melbourne Space Program with a dream of launching a satellite into space! Within this team, six students engineers are working on designing and building the Attitude and Determination System, which controls the direction the satellite points to in space. Without it, the CubeSat would spin around and around into oblivion.

Margaret Thanos is making a documentary on women in far-right extremist groups.

Margaret is making a documentary that explores the role of women in far-right extremist groups. Many women are fighting for the neo-nazi and far-right agenda and essentially fighting for their own oppression. Margaret will create a short doco that will explore the complexities of political ideology at odds with a person's best interests.

Amy Atkins is touring an educational comedy called PERIOD.

PERIOD. is a 50-minute educational comedy that follows 11-year-old Karla as she experiences her period for the first time. It’s designed to help people – young and old – understand periods. It aims to initiate discussions around period poverty, period shaming, and body awareness.

Lars Schering is building a tiny house on wheels.

Despite shelter being a basic human need, over recent years, housing in Australia has become highly unsustainable, both financially and environmentally. The Tiny House on wheels (THOW) attempts to challenge the preconceived ideas of what a house may be and redefine the traditional notion of a home. The design intervention intends to restore the ideas of what ‘shelter’ should be: a place that provides a place to call home without the financial burden often associated with housing.

Loredana Podolska-Kint is creating an Illustrated book of poems about the human body.

Lory is a medical student in Auckland, New Zealand, and poetry is her side-hustle. She will make small booklets of illustrated poems, each describing an organ of the body which will be distributed through schools. She hopes to inspire a new generation of poets and to educate young people about their bodies.

Mahmoud Mshinda is making an app that will help p people find art they like.

Mahmoud is building an app that will use deep learning and community curation to help people discover new works of art that specifically suit their tastes. His vision is to make something that will expand a persons understanding of their tastes and expose them to contemporary works of art that inspire and delight.

Bridget Kelly is an artist with minimal speech and Down Syndrome. She's creating a short film showcasing her work.

Bridget is an artist that we’ve just fallen in love with. Her art is bright, expressive and hopeful. As part of our program, she will produce a short video to present at an online conference for parents of a child with a disability. This video aims to showcase her art, along with a message to parents about following their child’s passions.

Lily Holloway is creating an online zine promoting queer poetry in New Zealand. It's called eel mag.

Lilly is a writer and a poet from Aotearoa. She is launching New Zealand's first queer online poetry journal, eel mag. She aims to pay for queer poetry and provide a platform to promote the work.

Alan Truong is making a platform for musicians to be able to jam online

Alan is going to bring musicians back together by building an online platform for musicians to collaborate and play together.

Tia Scott is making a website that will live stream St Kilda's Penguin colony.

Over the past year, St Kilda penguin viewings have changed dramatically, with COVID restrictions forcing the closure of the breakwater to the public. This has led to the disconnection of the local and wider community from the population. This project aims to reconnect people with penguins by providing them with front row seats to breeding activities in a virtual environment. Tia will purchase cameras and set up a virtual viewing platform for everyone to see.

Hannah Ahn is creating a co-living house where young people come together to work on passion projects.

Co-create brings curious young minds together for a 2-3 month period where they co-live in the same house and work on passion projects. Co-create intends to be a micro-campus and community for young people to do the best work of their lives together.

Levon Hutchinson is a toymaker building products for kids with sensory processing difficulties.

Levon is a toymaker who has designed a tactile toolkit for teachers who manage children with sensory processing difficulties in the mainstream primary school environment. The end product is a set of toys and sensory objects that a teacher can use to help a child return to a calm state of mind. Levon has already built the product, and through the Protostars program, he will try and reach a wider audience and work towards his dream of becoming a toymaker.

Grace Brown is working with a team of engineers to build a humanoid robot that can give hugs.

Abi is a humanoid currently being developed by a team of engineering students from the Melbourne Space Program. Abi is an anthropomorphic autonomous bipedal humanoid. Not only will she have image recognition and conversational abilities, but she will also be able to give out long-lost hugs and near-forgotten handshakes.

Jestika Chand and Jayce Carrano are producing a radio drama for FBi radio, set in a futuristic Sydney.

Logline: Believing that laughter is the best medicine, B3N – a young nursing robot – navigates the thriving megatropolis of Sydney to become the first robot stand up comedian.

FBI Radio has greenlit six episodes, and through the Protostars grant program, Jestika and her comedy partner will write and record the series.

Rachel Roberts is making a pilot episode of an animated series inspired by her experience with anxiety.

Rachel is an animator looking to create a pilot episode for a series she wants to make. The story will focus on the Gardener, a woman who is tasked with both keeping the royal grounds- and to a much lesser known extent- protecting everyone from the strange aberrations lurking beneath them. Until she befriends one. It's a story primarily inspired by her experience with anxiety, and she originally developed it while attending therapy.

Shori Hijikata is creating Shirts for Startups - limited edition t-shirts celebrating Australian startup culture.

Shirts of Startups (SoS) is like Humans of NY for the startup world (with founders in their company shirts). Shori will work with startups to design limited-edition shirts (e.g. Startup X’s Series A shirt). The shirts will be a restricted count, collector's item, with each shirt paired with a virtual NFT version.

Shawn Ingle is making an open-source electric bicycle conversion handbook.

Shawn is working on an electric bicycle conversion project to determine the easiest and most cost-effective way to convert an ordinary bicycle into an electrically powered bike. Urban mobility solutions such as e-bikes are an essential step towards addressing CO2 emissions. However, current options are expensive, and conversions can be challenging to undertake. Shawn will create an open-sourced 'E-bike Conversion' handbook and deliver workshops to help others quickly and cost-effectively create their e-bikes and accelerate the transition to a net-zero economy.

Tahlia Selzer is creating period education programs for girls in years 5 and up.

There is no period education programs in Australia that go into schools and teach young girls about the cycle of events in their bodies every month. Tahlia is creating a period education program in Melbourne. She will make two programs, one designed for girls in years five to seven and another planned for girls nine to eleven. Whilst each program will vary in detail, the foundational goal will be to educate girls on the four primary cycles of their period and allow them to become in tune with their bodies physiology.

Rashid Mohamed is designing and building homes intended for use in Space.

Rashid is making homes that will one day be used on Mars. If that sounds ambitious, well, it is. They’re called Orbital Homes and they are out of this world.

Claire Putt is adding a new section to a community garden in Brisbane.

Claire is the Founder and President of a local community garden, the Taringa Community Garden, which provides sustainable lifestyle options for locals. Her passion project is establishing a native plant strip within the garden to provide a space for educational opportunities and pollinators.

Riannah Burns is building a platform to encourage more young people to take an interest in finance.

Riannah is making is a new blog that explores the values that underpin personal finance. In particular, she's developing an approach to portfolio management grounded in axiology and ethics. The ultimate aim is to help more young people care about finance.

Ben Scales is high-performance materials using natural fibres native to New Zealand.

Ben is developing sustainable high-performance materials to increase the sustainability of industries by using natural fibres native to New Zealand, all while building a new sector in Aotearoa, which will form the basis of the supply chain while contributing to the environment and employing thousands. He is first making a small range of products, including snowboards, skateboards and chairs, from this material to prove it is worth adopting in other industries.

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The program has already begun. We are all building in public - myself included. Protostars will be sharing weekly updates, and I will be sharing those across our channels. To follow along, hit the Blackbird Foundation on Twitter, Instagram and subscribe to this Substack. Or follow me direct on Twitter.