Creative Heritage Hunters – The BigGive Christmas Challenge 2025
The BigGive Christmas Challenge
What is it?
The Christmas Challenge is the UK’s biggest collaborative fundraising campaign, championing a wide range of charitable organisations. Whatever the cause, from global poverty to gender equality, from climate change to mental wellbeing, every donation has the power to be doubled. BigGive enables thousands of charities to make an even bigger difference.
We hope you’ll help us make that difference by supporting us with our campaign.
You can find out more about BigGive and the campaign here, but it works through match funding. This model allows you, as one of our supporters, to have your donations doubled with match funds provided by Big Give’s Champion partners.
Pledge and Support Our Campaign
Our Campaign: Creative Heritage Hunters
What’s it about?
Over the past few years we have seen a great response to our exhibitions and activities which put creativity at the centre – providing creative responses to stories and experiences of conflict. We want to build on that with a new community engagement project that has creativity at its heart. Supporting our campaign means you will help us to hold a series of workshops that bring generations together and take them on mini journeys to discover what life was like during both world wars. From immersive experience days here at the museum to creating a new resource – a modern day Cabinet of Curiosities – and taking it out and about, we’ll use creativity to explore stories of life in wartime, from the home front to the front lines.
Wellbeing will also be threaded throughout the museum with the funds you help us raise. We will aim to provide everyone, regardless of age, health needs and abilities, with opportunities to enjoy the museum, take part in traditional activities, learn new skills and improve self-confidence, and to enjoy the company of others.
We will create a mobile mini-museum so even more people can be involved with the project throughout our wider community. If they can’t reach us, we want to take the museum to them! We already know objects can spark memories and conversations, and having this new resource will bring about even more stories and shared experiences.
We don’t know what all the end results will be – that all depends on your support – but with a little help, the campaign could expand to include a mini exhibition co curated by local artists, or military families – or even a weekend festival designed and led by young people?
Can you do this?
With your support, yes we can! Over the last few years we’ve greatly expanded the work we do with the community, offering a wide range of drop-ins, coffee mornings, and collaborating with community groups and other charities. We hope to build on our experience and expand what we can offer.
Since 2024 we’ve been running regular coffee mornings for armed forces veterans, and hosting therapeutic model-making session with charity Models for Heroes too. These now run every month, with regulars and new faces dropping in for a chat and brew. Many have even been kind enough to share their stories with us, adding to our Oral History archives.
Earlier this year we also started Meet Me at the Soldiers Museum, a weekly drop-in for older adults, which has provided a regular trip out for local care home residents and a chance to reminisce while taking a look around the museum.
We recently worked with Outside In to help open up the world of art, museums and exhibitions to veterans and others facing barriers to participation. Following a course on curating exhibitions, we hosted the Operation Varsity: Crossing Time exhibition. Participants were inspired talking to Varsity veteran Philip Aucott.
This month we opened LifeLines, a community art exhibition which brings together local artists with diverse backgrounds, producing art in response to a touching story told in our galleries, of soldier Arthur Tyler and Holocaust survivor Naomi Warren.
You can read more about our collaborative work with community groups, local schools and other charities here.
How can I help?
You can help by pledging towards the campaign now. Though the national campaign takes place in the run up to Christmas, we need to secure an initial £1000 in pledges before the end of August 2025 so that we qualify for the national campaign. Joining the national campaign means we can potentially access up to £30k in match funds.
Our initial pledge target, to bring this campaign to life, is £7912.25.
