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

YELS focuses on how education empowers young people. This not only relates to basic skills and basic knowledge, but also to learning and practicing the ‘life skills’ with which young people can shape their future. Education is central to this community. Not only in the school context with all its tracks and levels but also in educational programs outside this context such as museums.  

Using the form below, you can apply for financial support for activities that fit the scope of YELS. These activities should ideally be largely in line with our core values: co-creation, multidisciplinarity, co-ownership and creativity and playfulness. We consider it crucial to engage in co-creation with researchers, youth and societal partners (such as teachers, parents, youth professionals, policy makers) to have impact beyond academia. Moreover, the societal challenges our youth encounters, are complex and often multifaced. Multidisciplinary research provides opportunities to advance our understanding of the topic and spark innovative ways to face and change the future. Furthermore, researchers will truly engage in building our community and the autonomy of researchers is respected. We encourage them to take initiative, to take control, to bear responsibility, to feel confident and capable both to reach out to others and work on the research in the community. Finally, we acknowledge and stimulate creative and playful ways to collaborate and to discover and hopefully cross our own boundaries – boundaries to other researchers, to other disciplines, to adjacent research field, to societal partners, to youth.   

You could think of opportunities 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 for financial support as well.

We welcome multidisciplinary proposals with a maximum budget of 10K euros or larger interlinked multidisciplinary research projects with a maximum budget of 30K euros. At least two researchers from different disciplines can apply for a multidisciplinary research project and three teams (min. two researchers) of at least three different faculties can apply for an interlinked multidisciplinary research project.

Note that only UU and UMCU researchers can benefit from this financial support.

You can read about other projects that have been granted funding here, here and here.

New proposals are welcome until the 30th of May 2025.