Who can apply and for what purpose?

The Foundation awards grants for specific purposes. The result of grant work will be e.g. an event, a book of non-fiction, or a piece of journalism. Grants for public education are only awarded to private individuals and collectives.

Field-specific guidelines are in force for the time being.

An individual grant can be applied for by Finns or by people who work in Finland for the advancement of Finnish science, culture, and civil society. The grant is intended for full-time work, performed during the calendar year that follows the year the grant was awarded. Grants are not awarded retrospectively. Work may not begin before the December of the year the grant was awarded.

Applying for a grant

The application period is from 1 to 15 August 2023. The application period ends on 15 August 2023 at 4 pm Finnish time. Use the Foundation’s online grant service for your grant application. Grant applications can be created and sent in the grant online service only during the application period.

Net banking identification is required for grant applications. The application and its appendices must be delivered to the online service within the application period. The Foundation will not accept incomplete or late applications or their appendices.

Which field?

You can direct your application to one field. When drawing up your application, you must select the field (non-fiction, lifelong learning, journalism) whose experts you wish to evaluate your application. If your application is multi-artistic or multidisciplinary, choose the field you yourself think best fits your project, or which best represents your application. Please note that various fields have restrictions pertaining to the type of applicant.

Criteria for awarding a grant

The purpose of the Alfred Kordelin Foundation is to promote and support Finnish science, literature, arts, and public education. Applicants may receive grants if they, based on prior established work, are in a position to implement the plan that they have proposed. When evaluating grant applications, our experts pay attention to the objectives set for the work, and the intended end result. In grant applications from collectives, the budget needs to be carefully drawn up.

Grant applications are evaluated and funding decisions made on the basis of the following issues:

• Project originality
• Feasibility of the implementation plan
• Earlier merits of the applicant
• Significance of the project. The applicant has carefully considered how the project will promote their own professional development or that of their collective, and what kind of audiences the project could reach.

Grant applications are assessed in three pools as follows:

Pool 1. Lifelong learning
Pool 2. Journalism
Pool 3. Writing non-fiction and translating non-fiction into Finnish.

Grant applications are assessed in three phases:

1. Experts assess the applications assigned to the pool based on assessment criteria, select the applications that best fulfill said criteria, and write a commentary on their choices to the assessment system.
2. The experts acquaint themselves with all selected proposals prior to the pool’s general meeting.
3. Funding decisions are prepared in the pool’s general meeting and submitted to the Board for decisions.

Size and duration of the grant

In most cases, grants have a duration of 12 or 6 months. Working grants are intended for the continuous, full-time work of private individuals during a specified period of time. Grants are not awarded for part-time work. The size of a working grant is approximately €2,166 per month.

You can include expenses such as material expenses, assistant expenses and purchased services into your work. Mela, the insurer of grant recipients, will accept expenses that account for max. half of the received grant. The grant covers employment pension insurance, occupational accident insurance, and group life insurance.  More information is available from Mela.

Grants

• An individual 12-month working grant of €26,000.
• An individual 6-month working grant of €13,000.
• An individual working grant in some other amount. In some special circumstances, the applicant can apply for a grant with a duration of four months or more, but not exceeding 12 months.
• The maximum sum of a project grant for a collective can be max. €35,000, and the duration of the project max 12 months.

Appendices

We recommend that you attach only the mandatory appendices to your application. If the application is incomplete, the service will prevent it from being sent until the missing information has been added.

Instructions for appendices

• All appendices must be in pdf format, and they must be sent via the grant online service as individual files.
• The maximum size of an appendix is 3 MB.
• Name the appendices in a way that describes their contents, and avoid special characters.
• The length of a working plan must not exceed five (5) pages.

Before writing your application

Check from the list below what are the fields and purposes for which the Foundation awards grants, and also check the field- and applicant-specific appendices.

Check that you have submitted a usage report on previously received grants before applying for a new grant.

Decisions

The decisions on awarded grants are made by the Board of Directors of the Alfred Kordelin Foundation in October. All applicants will receive information on the decisions in November via email.