The community Youth Education & Life Skills, YELS for short, offers financial support for research activities that fit the scope of YELS.

The community Youth Education & Life Skills focuses on how education empowers young people. Schools as well as other organizations strive to contribute to the knowledge and skills that young people need to shape their future. Our community aims to provide evidence-based knowledge and activities to support this goal. More information about our focus and activities can be found on the Community Platform: https://doy-community.sites.uu.nl/youth-education-life-skills/

You can apply for financial support for activities that fit the scope of YELS and are in line with our core values: co-creation with researchers, youth and (educational) partners, multidisciplinary collaboration, a creative and playful approach to discovery, and active participation in community building. Proposals should also include realizable aims for high quality research output and research dissemination.

To get you started, we would like to suggest applying for research activities such as:

• Start new multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary research collaborations
• Prolong existing multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary research collaborations
• Generate impact of your research on the scientific community
• Generate impact of your research on practitioners or the general public

Other ideas for research activities that fit our scope and values are eligible as well. You can read about other projects that have been granted funding here, here, here, and here.

We welcome multidisciplinary proposals – by researchers from at least two different disciplines – for a maximum budget of 10K euros. We also welcome interlinked multidisciplinary research projects with a maximum budget of 30K euros. These projects should consist of several teams (minimum of two researchers) of at least three different faculties who link their research projects. Note that only UU and UMCU researchers can benefit from this financial support.

If you receive funding, we expect that you are available for two dissemination / community building activities. First, halfway the project runtime, you share an interview, a blogpost, a podcast or a vodcast about the project. Second, you participate in the yearly YELS Project Meet-Up that we organize for our laureates. With these activities, we aim to further broaden and strengthen the community.

New proposals are welcome until the 13 June, 2025. You can use the forms below to apply.

We are looking forward to receiving your proposal!

Veronique Schutjens, Pascale van Zantvliet, Bob Jeurgens