Michael Archibald, a student of Strathclyde University, was selected to design the first tote bag as part of a new range launched by the John Lewis Partnership. Building Better Futures works directly with Who Cares Scotland to offer creative opportunities to care experienced young people.
Category
🦄
CreativityTranscript
00:00 I'm really excited to launch this. I see these bags and I see them in stores and
00:05 there's part of me that feels really proud. I am a Care Experience individual
00:09 and we can do a bunch of incredibly amazing things. It is about making sure
00:15 that people can acknowledge that this is something that's really important and
00:19 Care Experience folks should have the same like opportunities as anyone else
00:24 does. There is no line where they're lesser than anyone else. There is no form
00:31 where it's like they just don't deserve these same opportunities. Who Cares Scotland is a
00:36 charity. We're the national membership organisation for Care Experience people
00:39 across Scotland. We've got 4,000 members and we've been going for 45 years. So
00:44 Care Experience is anything from being adopted, fostered, living in residential
00:49 care, but you can also live at home with your parents but be under social
00:53 work supervision. Our role is about making sure that Care Experience people
00:57 have a lifetime of equality, respect and love, which isn't the case at the
01:03 moment across the UK for Care Experience people, particularly in
01:05 Scotland. Although there's a lot of people trying really hard to make change,
01:09 outcomes are still quite challenging and for us it's very much about
01:13 providing as many opportunities as we can for Care Experience people to
01:17 thrive because all young people need the opportunity to thrive. So this started
01:22 off because I was keeping up with Who Cares Scotland's news media, their
01:28 pages and there was this opportunity to work with some kind of company and it
01:35 was all about people who had creative inclinations, people who could
01:41 do art and I was really interested. It wasn't disclosed as to what company it
01:45 would be that we were working with but I love getting involved in things and I
01:51 wanted to apply. We were looking at all of these different things about
01:56 what could inspire you to make a design and I noted to
02:01 myself that I need to keep it quite simplistic, quite eye-catching
02:06 and for the art piece that I had submitted, there was in the middle
02:12 and the background I drew the Sun, the North Star and I kind of used
02:17 that as well as a bit of inspiration because I really enjoyed doing it and I
02:21 thought wow how nice and lovely that is and if this is the art piece
02:26 that they chose then maybe I can also incorporate a bit of that. So using
02:30 that same kind of design I wanted that to express care
02:37 experienced folk, that is their essence, this is what represents
02:41 them and then around it everything is very nice and organic and it's just
02:45 showing how these two different things can work in tandem.
02:49 It's not unusual for care experienced folk to just be about and be able to
02:55 experience things that are the same as other people and it was all about
02:59 making sure that the surrounding environment and these care
03:03 experienced people can work in harmony and it is something that can be done and
03:07 it is a beautiful picture if you really just let it be. When it came to the
03:13 colours I was very inspired by the colours in Who Cares Scotland. I wanted to
03:19 incorporate reds, so there was like the purples, there was the blues
03:23 and then the yellow so it was very much like I wanted to feel like there was
03:29 something that I could look at that not only made me go well those are
03:33 really lovely colours I could wear this, I could take this about the place
03:36 because it's not like people are gonna be like wait that's like a little girls
03:41 bag or someone be like oh that's like such a guy's bag like it is quite I
03:46 wanted to make it like for everyone because care experience is for everyone
03:51 and for me I wanted to just have that kind of neutrality and just have
03:57 something that was eye-catching, something that felt good, something that
04:00 felt like something I could look at and go that's me I made that and obviously
04:08 I'm very happy with how the coral turned out because I my friends my favourite
04:13 colour and I wanted something that also felt like it had my influence still and
04:18 coral was quite it pops out so it I wanted to make sure that everything went
04:23 with like all of the colours and still kind of felt like part of the design
04:30 while also being something that I could link into as well. Being care experienced
04:34 I have a lot of compassion for other care experienced folks like I it kind of
04:39 feels like I'm talking to family sometimes and I adore that feeling and I
04:43 cherish it quite a lot and it's something that means a lot to me and I
04:47 want it to mean a lot to other people too because this is something that
04:51 matters quite a lot and I'm really grateful for John Lewis like opening up
04:56 this like brand this opportunity and this idea I think I don't see anything
05:01 wrong with it I I think it's just such a positive movement and I really really
05:06 hope that this goes a lot of places and I cannot wait to see our new folk when
05:13 they start to make their own brands and designs and I'm just really excited for