Education is one of the foundational pillars of IDSA and at the heart of IDSA’s Design Foundation. Founded by IDSA in 2001, the Design Foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization built to produce charitable and educational programming for the advancement of the industrial design profession.
The most well-known and longstanding of the Design Foundation’s initiatives is the annual undergraduate scholarship program. To date, this program has awarded over $30,000 in financial assistance to dozens of design students. These scholarships allow IDSA to help students at the earliest stages of their design careers and provide much-needed financial support in the pursuit of an industrial design degree.
"Winning the 2020 Design Foundation Undergraduate Scholarship is not only a recognition of my work but also a fuel for me to continue my career aspiration: designing objects that spread joyfulness to the world, little by little. It helped me to continue my education and pursue my design career."
This giving season (now through December 31, 2020), we are asking you to please consider donating to the Design Foundation’s general fund, which directly supports the undergraduate scholarship program and helps to bring new charitable initiatives to our community.
Your tax-deductible donation will ensure that the Design Foundation can continue to fund charitable efforts, increase scholarships, and develop new initiatives in the future. You may donate $100, $250, $500, or an amount of your choosing. No gift is too small; every dollar counts. Thank you for your consideration. We are endlessly grateful, especially this year, for your support.
Looking ahead, we know there is much more we can do to fulfill our mission and strengthen our community.
This year, under the direction of the Design Foundation’s Board of Trustees, we set plans in place to develop a new blueprint for our future. We’ve already expanded our programming to include providing free event registration to IDSA’s conferences and events for design students. The Design Foundation also is partnering with IDSA’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Council to increase support for Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC), women and gender-nonconforming designers, and students from K-12 through college, with the goal of creating a bigger impact in the lives of young designers across the country.
Learn more about the Design Foundation’s mission and values at IDSA.org/DesignFoundation.