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 and research projects in working groups, as well as to create art and artistic productions. In addition to researchers and artists, a small number of journalists and activists were also funded under the new In the Woods (Metsän puolella) initiative. 

Kone Foundation funding can be granted for academic research and professional artistic work at different career stages. In order to pay personal grants, we collect grantees’ date of birth and address information.

In the age distribution, those born in the 1980s, or those aged 34 to 43, made the largest group. They accounted for 44% of the Foundation’s grantees.  

Just under a quarter of grantees were born in the 1970s, and around one in five in the 1990s. 

The oldest age group, those born in the 1940s, accounted for a very small proportion of grantees. The oldest of our grantees was born in 1944.  

Those born in the 2000s still accounted for less than 1% of our grantees (next year, their share will surely be more). The youngest was born in 2005. 

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.  

The grants are intended for Finns (for work in Finland or abroad), for foreigners for work carried out in Finland, and for foreigners for project work that includes participants based 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 2023, grant payments were made to 44 different countries.

From our office in Lauttasaari, the closest recipient lived a few hundred metres away. The farthest lived more than 15,000 kilometres away in South Australia. 

11% of grant recipients lived outside of Finland. A person’s nationality or native language cannot be concluded from where they live. 

However, we know that about 15% of all grantees had selected English as their preferred language of communication, and the rest had selected Finnish.  

We offer our grantees customer service and training sessions in both Finnish and English. The mixing of languages and places of residence is illustrated by the fact that participants in Finnish-language remote meetings may join from as far away as Johannesburg and New York, and at the same time, someone may arrive to our office in Lauttasaari for an English-language in-person meeting by foot.

A striking 46% of all grantees lived in Helsinki, while 43% lived elsewhere in Finland. In the arts in particular, grantees are strongly concentrated in the capital. 

The next most common locations after Helsinki were other university cities in Finland: Turku, Tampere, Jyväskylä, Espoo, and Oulu. 

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. The most common postcode was 00530 in Kallio-Hakaniemi and the most common street was Hämeentie. 

In Helsinki, in addition to the eastern city centre area, the largest number of grant recipients lived in the city centre and Etu-Töölö (00100), Käpylä (00610), Roihuvuori (00820) and Länsi-Herttoniemi (00800). In Turku, the most common areas were the city centre (20100) and Nummi-Ylioppilaskylä (20540), and in Tampere, the city centre (33100) and Tammela-Petsamo (33500).