Opportunities for Financial Support: Lessons Learned

About a year ago, the Youth Education & Life Skills community was launched by Dynamics of Youth. Starting and facilitating a community has been a whole new adventure for us, Veronique, Liesbeth, Pascale and Elena. And thus, a great opportunity for exploring, experimenting, and learning. And that is exactly what we did in the past three months when we organized the first round of offering financial support. In this post, we are happy to share our ideas and experiences with you. 

This was the first time for all of us to give out financial support. What do we aim for, what are our criteria, how detailed should the application form be, how to promote the financial support? These were all questions that arose. Rather than trying to make everything perfect, we opted for just giving it a try and learning while doing.

At our Kick-off Event in April, we first announced the funding opportunities that the Youth Education & Life Skills community offers. From the end of May onwards, all UU and UMCU researchers could apply for financial support for their research project. By 30 June, we were excited to have received eight applications. The applications were all quite different from each other. Some focused on continuing existing research, some on exploring new research collaborations. Researchers from a large range of disciplinary background and in various phases of their career applied. We learned many things after this first round of evaluating research project applications. There are three reflections we specifically like to share with you. 

High quality

From the beginning, our aim was to give ideas for innovative and impactful research the opportunity to develop and flourish. Rather than asking for a very detailed plan, we opted for using a ‘light’ application. That being said, we do not comprise on – what we believe should be – the most important criteria: the quality of the project plan. Plans that clearly and convincingly articulate the project’s  contribution to evidence-based knowledge and activities in the field of youth education really got us excited to support financially.   

Mutltidisciplinarity and co-creation

We also highly valued whether the project plan fits our values: multidisciplinarity, co-creation, co-ownership, creativity and playfulness. We especially looked at multidisciplinarity. This can be realized in several ways. Across faculties, but also within faculties across disciplines. With our community, we hope to promote collaborations between researchers whose perspective and expertise are really of added value to each other. Collaborations with colleagues you might not naturally run into at symposia or conferences, but who are really valuable to bring forward new insights. Another important value we will appreciate highly in research projects is co-creation with societal partners and / or youth. By combining expertise, experiences and perspectives from the educational field and from academics, we learn from each other and can make sure that we are addressing the questions that matter and that the insights are shared with a broader audience. This turns wishful thinking via joint explorations into productive action: from society, via scientific research, back to society.  

Education is our arena

Last, we also realized the importance of context. The Youth Education & Life Skills community is dedicated to making education the place where children can develop to their full potential. As researchers, we can do so by contributing evidence-based knowledge about the learning process of different life skills in various educational settings. Education (both formal and non-formal) is our arena – and this we like to emphasize more. We are excited that in the current projects, a large variety of educational contexts were addressed, such as schools in Gambia, the online environment of university students, and a museum.

Curious to learn about the granted projects? Please take a view at the full list of granted projects July 2023 here.

New opportunities

All in all, the application process contributed to further developing the vision and mission for the Youth Education and Life Skills community. On a more practical level, we learned to formulate the criteria more clearly and will include these clarifications in the revised application form for the upcoming rounds of financial opportunities. The next one is already planned in Fall 2023: deadline is 30 November 2023. We hope for exciting project plans!