Kone Foundation funding can be granted for academic research and professional artistic work at different career stages. About three quarters of the Foundation’s funding was allocated to research, while one quarter supported artists. The funding was used, for example, to carry out dissertations, research projects, artistic productions or projects that combine research and art. In addition to researchers and artists, a small number of journalists and activists were also funded under the Metsän puolella initiative.

The amount of funding awarded by Kone Foundation has increased in recent years, and this year the total number of grant months reached an all-time high. When the personal monthly grants paid in 2024 are converted into person-years, Kone Foundation paid out grants equivalent to the work of nearly one thousand people. In 2023, the figure was 802 person-years.

In order to pay personal grants, we collect grantees’ date of birth and address information.

In the age distribution, those born in the 1980s made the largest group, accounting for 44.4% of the Foundation’s grantees.  

This year, the number of grantees born in the 1990s (24.9%) was clearly higher than the number of grantees born in the 1970s (20.8%).

Grantees born in the 1930s, 1940s and 2000s were a rarity. The oldest grantee was born in 1936, the youngest in 2002.

Where do our grantees live?

Projects funded by Kone Foundation must have a connection to Finland, but grant recipients do not have to be Finnish and they do not have to live in Finland.  

We do not collect information on the gender, native language or nationality of grantees, but from the address data we can see that Kone Foundation has grantees all over the world. In 2024, grant payments were made to 42 different countries.

From our office in Lauttasaari, the closest grantee lived only a couple hundred metres away. The farthest lived almost 15,000 kilometres away in Australia.

9% of grantees lived outside of Finland. A person’s nationality or native language cannot be concluded from where they live. However, we know that about 18% of all grantees had selected English as their preferred language of communication, and the rest had selected Finnish.  

Of the grantees living in Finland, around half lived in Helsinki. In the arts in particular, grantees are strongly concentrated in the capital. 

After Helsinki, the next most common cities of residence were other Finnish university cities: Turku (8%), Tampere (7%), Jyväskylä (4%), Espoo (3%), and Oulu (2%).

In recent years, we have also kept track of the most common residential street and postcode for the Foundation’s grantees. This year, they can again be found in Helsinki’s eastern city centre.

In Helsinki, in addition to Kallio, Vallila, Alppila and the rest of the eastern city centre area, common places to live included Arabianranta, Käpylä, Herttoniemi and Roihuvuori. In Turku, the most common areas were the city centre, Martti-Korppolaismäki and Nummi-Ylioppilaskylä, while in Tampere the city centre and Tammela-Petsamo were the most common.