Charity

14 September 2020

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Players of People’s Postcode Lottery have supported V&A Dundee for seven years, helping bring design to communities and schools across Scotland, inspiring the next generation of creative thinkers and problem solvers.

Scotland’s first design museum opened in 2018, creating a new international centre for design to excite and inspire visitors, but for years before then the team had already been travelling around Scotland and the UK.

Players of People’s Postcode Lottery have raised almost £2 million for the museum. This has helped enable V&A Dundee to work in care homes, community centres and schools right around the country over the last seven years. Before opening over 100,000 people engaged with V&A Dundee, thanks to the support of players.

Since opening:

  • Over one million people have visited V&A Dundee
  • More than 4,000 school pupils have visited
  • Over 26,000 visitors have taken part in our learning programme
  • The museum had a £75 million economic impact across Scotland in its first year
Crop VA Schools 74

At the heart of V&A Dundee is a commitment to the power of design to change lives.

Through its Schools Design Challenge, first run in 2015 and again earlier this year, it's worked with hundreds of teams of school pupils to unleash their creative potential – and to help them understand that they too can change the world around them for the better.

 

This year the challenge focused on loneliness and isolation, asking secondary school pupils across Dundee, Angus, Perth and Kinross and the Highlands to design new solutions to these growing problems in their school communities.

A judging panel selected 17 teams to take part in a design jam with the support of professional designers and V&A Dundee staff, with their work now on show in the museum.

Loneliness and isolation in schools can often go unnoticed. A pupil can be in a class of 30 others but still feel alone. Design is a fundamental skill, and one the museum believes every child in Scotland needs to be competent and confident in to achieve their full potential.

Engaging communities, families and young people in Dundee with the power of design is a key area of work supported by players of People’s Postcode Lottery.

Before opening this included work with Home-Start Dundee to design the museum’s activities for families. This local charity supports families with young children through a range of issues including post-natal depression, isolation, physical health problems and bereavement.

Now the museum is working with Turner Prize-winning architecture collective Assemble on a project with Dundee Central Library, local school pupils and the museum’s Young People’s Collective.

Making Room is taking inspiration from historic buildings in Dundee to produce a new interior room that will be built in V&A Dundee before being moved to Dundee Central Library, where it will function as an area for digital learning and making for the city.