Global Heritage Project Funding Award

Kick Arts Project poster with multi-coloured design on black background

Pitt Rivers Museum and OYAP Trust secure Heritage Lottery 'Young Roots' grant for work with young people.

The Pitt Rivers Museum and OYAP Trust have secured a grant of £50,000 for a 2 year project called Global Heritage to enable young people to discover and interpret global heritage. This participatory project will enable young people to develop creative, heritage and vocational skills by creating their own exhibitions, events and peer-learning opportunities. It will run until 2018. Global Heritage comprises two concurrent programmes:

Kick Arts is an innovative flexi-school model devised by OYAP Trust for 11-16 year olds from Oxfordshire who are school refusers or at risk of exclusion. The 15-week programme led by a specialist artist educator will be based at the Pitt Rivers Museum. The first programme will run in autumn 2017.

The programme uses the creativity and the irresistible qualities of the arts to improve young people's attitudes to and relationship with learning and provides a means for young people to reintegrate into mainstream education. The young people will create artwork inspired by the vast Pitt Rivers Collection, stage their own exhibition in the museum and undertake an Arts Award qualification.

The young people will also be supported by a specialist heritage worker with in-depth knowledge of the Pitt Rivers Collections, as well as additional artist educators with special talent for and experience of working with disengaged young people. Participants will explore a variety of art forms, from slam poetry and music to photography, film-making, music and visual arts.

The Pitt Youth Action Team is a group of young people aged 14 to 19 from Oxfordshire who will meet once a month at the Pitt Rivers Museum. They will work together to plan events for other young people, do creative projects inspired by the museum and exploring behind the scenes at the museum. Participants will also undertake an Arts Award qualification. A 'taster' session took place in October with young people making short films using a green screen and taking part in animation workshops. The next meeting will take place on Saturday 18 February at the Pitt Rivers Museum from 11am-1pm.

Director of OYAP Trust, Helen Le Brocq, says: " OYAP Trust and the Pitt Rivers Museum are delighted to be working together in such an adventurous and exploratory way with young people. We hope they will create genuinely unexpected events and artwork that is inspired by this unique collection of human ingenuity and creativity. It's going to be exciting to see our young people making artefacts relevant to their own twenty-first century lives."

Emerging young heritage/arts leaders from OYAP Trust will also be trained to mentor participants across both programmes in the Global Heritage Youth Action project. These young leaders will work towards Gold Arts Award.

For more information contact the Pitt Rivers Museum press team: press@prm.ox.ac.uk.