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Funk It Up

Funk It Up

  • Location: Scottish Borders
  • Project Type: Cultural Community
  • Area: Scotland
  • Awarded: £1000
  • Status: Completed 

Project Details

Funk It Up is a furniture re-cycling project aimed at helping kids struggling to cope in mainstream education. It very cleverly brings together several strands, creating something with tremendous potential. They collect donated furniture from members of the public, some of which is good solid wood, but undesirable in its present condition. Then they enlist young people from the local area and show them how to turn a piece of old furniture into something unique and marketable. With just a bit of paint, materials and techniques they can be taught to transform a quite ordinary piece of furniture into a desirable object. Not only does this allow the kids a break from traditional learning, but it helps them attain self-esteem, confidence, communication and craft skills and at the same time addresses the issue of over consumption and landfill. It costs very little to do and has the potential to develop into something bigger and more profitable. They told us that they thought Its Your Community funding would give the project more “street cred”. And we felt that this project, the brain child of a small organization in a very rural setting was so clever that it deserved to have the paints and materials it needed to carry on.

Project Updates

  • 30/09/2008 The project has been wonderful. 'Funk it Up' has been running for nearly a year. The charity Home Basics takes in a donated furniture and household goods and some of these that might otherwise have been sent to landfill have been refurbished and put out for the public to buy. Arran the pupils who comes down to work with us each week has been awarded a special volunteers award for doing 100 hours of work with us. He received his award from a local MSP who was very impressed with what he has been doing and what he has learnt. Arran wants to go on to train to work in the building trade and coming to us each week has helped him a lot. Now we have new pupils wanting the same chance. Thank you for the chance to do this work

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