Deadline:
May 31, 2025
Location(s)
Japan Worldwide
Overview
The grant program focuses on deepening mutual understanding and knowledge-sharing among people on the ground in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia who are finding solutions to shared issues. Through promoting direct interaction among key players, the grant program aims to survey and analyze situations in target countries, obtain new perspectives, and expand the potential of future generations.
Details
With multinational teams comprised of participants from diverse backgrounds, projects can avoid conventional linear relationships, such as “supporter and supported” or “instructor and trainee,” and instead form cooperative and creative alliances that consider, act on, and construct solutions to shared issues. The grant program anticipates that these partnerships, which extend beyond such factors as nationality, age, and organizational affiliation, will produce significant social change through fostering a process of mutual learning.
The Toyota Foundation is a grant-making foundation whose goal is to contribute toward the realization of a more people-oriented society and a resulting increase in human happiness. We provide grants in support of research and projects in order to identify a diverse array of social issues, with a focus on the areas of human and natural environment, social welfare, education and culture. From its outset, the Toyota Foundation has provided grants with an approach to supporting projects based on “foresight,” “a participatory orientation,” and “an international perspective.”
Based on this fundamental philosophy, the Toyota Foundation will target proposals that fulfill the following points for grants from this year
- Great significance for society
- Anticipating internal and external issues
- Future-oriented
- Sustainable and developable
- Expected to have a ripple effect
Program Objective
The very ideals of developed countries which are based on democracy and the market economy have been severely shaken by struggles and controversy such as widening disparities, the rise of nationalism and populism, prolonged conflicts and the intake of large numbers of refugees, ostracism of migrants and refugees, authoritarian politics, trade conflict, and the dissemination of fake news associated with the proliferation of social networking sites (SNSs). In addition, people are becoming more and more aware of global issues such as the failure of markets and climate change through sharp increases in the price of food, frequent natural disasters, and other phenomena. This has resulted in greater uncertainty and anxiety about the future among people all around the world not only in developed countries, including Japan, but also in developing countries.
What is needed to create the future in the face of today’s society? The Toyota Foundation Research Grant Program is based on a belief that what is needed is to uncover potential problems that are still invisible in addition to problems that have already manifested themselves, and to address these problems by “Exploring New Values for Society.” This is because it is difficult to identify the essence of complex issues and obtain the clues that will guide us to prevention and resolution of such issues through standardized values and compartmentalized knowledge. We need to move forward toward new values for society while fundamentally reevaluating our conventional ways of thinking and the state of society from a wider and more flexible perspective that looks into the future with a panoramic view of the world.
Based on this awareness of the issues involved, following last year, the Toyota Foundation Research Grant Program is continuing to support research projects in accordance with its program title, “Exploring New Values for Society,” and invites joint research proposals from people with diverse backgrounds, not limited to researchers affiliated with a university or research institute. However, this year, more than ever before, it is required to clarify the questions that need to be asked and what the new values for society to be explored with the aim of working through these questions are. This is because we believe that “Exploring New Values for Society” means that researchers themselves, while being part of society and questioning themselves about the social significance of their own research, lead the uncovering of problems and creating of the future.
It is our hope that research will be deepened with a youthful and free-minded perspective and new values that lead us to the future will be created. The Toyota Foundation would also like to work in a partnership with the researchers to share research findings more widely in society than in the previous year.
Opportunity is About
Eligibility
Candidates should be from:
Description of Ideal Candidate
Requirements
- In principle, project teams of three persons or more are eligible for the grant. (Proposals by teams of two persons or less shall be accepted in cases where it is difficult to organize a team of three persons due to reasons such as the novelty of the social issues targeted by the project.)
- Project representatives must be 45 years old or under on the day of the beginning of the grant.
- All nationalities may apply, but project representative must have a residence(contact address) in Japan.
- No restrictions are placed on proposals with regard to the areas of research or the methods employed; nor is there any limitation with regard to the nationality of the project representative or participants, or their affiliation(or lack thereof) with a university, research institute, NPO/NGO, or other organization.
Dates
Deadline: May 31, 2025
Cost/funding for participants
Grant Amount (maximum per project)
- One-year project: JPY 5,000,000
- Two-year project: JPY 10,000,000
Un-save Opportunity
Internships, scholarships, student conferences and competitions.
