Kick the Dust is a £10million grants programme for ambitious youth-focused projects that transform how heritage organisations engage with young people. We define young people as those aged 11-25. You will be able to apply for a grant from £500,000 to £1m as part of a consortium, which should include heritage and youth organisations.

Pre-application workshops

Please read about our priorities for Kick the Dust below, and book via our Eventbrite page if you would like to attend one of these workshops.

• Wednesday 28 September: London
• Friday 30 September: Edinburgh
• Wednesday 5 October: Cardiff
• Thursday 6 October: Manchester
• Monday 10 October: Nottingham
• Tuesday 11 October:  Newcastle
• Tuesday 18 October: Birmingham
• Monday 24 October: Belfast

If you experience any issues with the booking system for the workshops, please get in touch.

Programme priorities

Kick the Dust is intended to:

• make heritage relevant to more and a greater diversity of young people, building on their needs and interests
• increase the ambition, scale and quality of youth engagement with heritage
• develop and embed sustainable, ongoing work with young people within heritage organisations
• evidence the value of youth engagement with heritage

Projects will also need to meet at least one of our outcomes for heritage, one for people and one for communities.

Further information

• The guidance for this initiative will be available from 23 September 2016. There will be a mandatory project enquiry stage followed by an application process in two rounds. Project enquiries must be submitted by 2 December 2016, and the deadline for first-round applications will be 20 February 2017
• Kick the Dust will fund applications from consortia of three or more organisations, including heritage and youth organisations. Applications should be submitted by a lead applicant, who will receive the grant
• Projects should take three to five years to complete
• We want to help ensure high quality evaluation within projects, and develop an evidence base to inform future work. As part of Kick the Dust, we will expect grantees to work together with our evaluators and other consortia as a cohort
• At HLF, we will be asking young people to help us decide which applications should be funded
• We don’t have any more detail available at the moment. Please hold on to your questions about the programme until after the guidance is published in September; our officers won’t be able to help you before then
• Smaller grants are available for work with young people: see Young Roots and Sharing Heritage

Why Kick the Dust?

Further information about the research and consultation informing development of the programme can be found on our online community.