Looking for bold initiatives

The annual application period for Kone Foundation grants has begun. Grants can be awarded for academic research, the arts, and for projects which combine scholarly and artistic approaches. The thematic funding call The close neighbours is also open.

The goal of Kone Foundation is to advance bold initiatives in research and the arts. Kone Foundation looks for countercurrents and is interested in the margins. The foundation also believes in an interdisciplinary approach and encounters across fields of art and research and between research and the arts.

The application process is renewed so that Kone Foundation can better advance multidisciplinary approaches and continuity. There is only one application form. An applicant will no longer select their art or research discipline in the new application form; instead, they select the expertise profile of a person by whom they wish to have the application evaluated. The same three levels of grants are adopted for all monthly grants. Foundation will more often grant the whole funding all at once to projects that last several years, in order to guarantee their continuity. We will also grant funding for the preparation of projects.

Grants can be sought for:

academic research and/or artistic work
promoting academic or artistic work (for example, a project which contributes to developing a field)
work which is based on academic or artistic work (such as making research or art available for different audiences)
other cultural initiatives

In research, grants can be awarded for humanities, social sciences, environmental research, and artistic research. Projects can be multi- or interdisciplinary and they can combine artistic and scholarly approaches.

The annual funding call of Kone Foundation is open from 1 September until 30 September 16:00 Finnish time (EEST).

The thematic funding call ‘The changing ”neighbournesses” of Finland: The close neighbours’ will also be open during the application period. The purpose of the funding call is to find out, using the means of research, what ”neighbourness” means after Finland encountered the collapse of the Soviet union and then a refugee crisis. Despite the recent numbers of refugees, the new neighbours have mostly come from our vicinity to the south and to the east. In Finland, a growing number of inhabitants have a background in Russia or Estonia, and they are still connected with these countries. At the same time, the well-established connections to our Scandinavian neighbours Sweden and Norway are still there, and are developing. Read more