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Support Activities

Requirements

Some How-to's

The Andrea von Braun Foundation supports projects, research and other activities that are

  1. Sufficiently interdisciplinary in nature
  2. Devoted to the aims of sustainability in ecological boundary areas
  3. Highly defined by practical implementability

Our support is decided in a process involving our in-house panels. We also welcome outside suggestions.

The Foundation is open for cooperation with other foundations, support organizations, universities, research institutes, corporations, government bodies or private practioners. This expressly includes non-academic projects.

Our most important criterion for deciding our involvement is the fulfillment of our priorities and aims. These can be found on our website. They involve

  1. The elimination of barriers between disciplines and areas of expertise, especially those that have had only very little or no interaction in the past.
  2. The protection and development of ecological boundary areas including their economic, societal and cultural aspects. Every project needs to be clear about its expected outcomes and how one can expect the disciplines involved therein to enhance or strengthen one another.

Some points are important to us

Even though our application process is relatively informal, there are a few things we consider important:

  1. Please communicate with us by email only. Postal correspondence and other correspondence sent by conventional (snail) mail require more work and lead to higher costs (stamps, office materials, storage space, etc.). They will reduce our support budget and lengthen processing times. Therefore, please do not send catalogues, small libraries, digital storage media or the like. If we need something in the original, supporting data or any other additional material we will say so.
  2. It would help if you entered your name and project title in the reference line.
  3. Please use standard data formats, i.e. Microsoft Office (Word, Powerpoint, Excel) for alphanumerics, .jpg or .gif for images, or .pdf.
  4. Save resources, both for digital storage and electricity. In most cases 5-10MB should be sufficient. And please do not copy- or write-protect your files.
  5. A small suggestion regarding your application style: The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once suggested, "Use common words to say uncommon things." Admittedly, he did not always stick to this recommendation himself, but it is still a good piece of advice. We discourage the use of fancy-sounding scientific terms where plain language will do. Write clearly, concisely, and unambiguously in an everyday language. Whoever wants to communicate between disciplines can only do so in a way that can be understood by any newspaper reader.
  6. Please include a 10-line abstract of your proposed project. We need this for our database. It is essentially the label under which we handle it and should therefore be both concise, exact, comprehensible and complete. It should include your budget (total and applied for from us), date of project start, planned duration, subject, interdisciplinary aspects, relation to our priorities, and the expected results.
  7. Don't forget useful references (CV, school reports and/or transcripts, letters of recommendation, etc), your detailed budget, particularly the exact amount you need, your planned schedule, and sources of financing. Keep it brief. Some of the best applications we received have not been longer than five pages.
  8. Please note that we do not provide pure printing cost subsidies.

With the acceptance of financial support by the Foundation and upon completion of your proposed project, you as the recipient of funds agree

  1. to evaluate and present the interdisciplinary character of your project. First, this will take the form of a so-called learning paper which describes the problems and benefits derived from the interaction of the different disciplines in your project, the difficulties that were encountered, and how these were overcome, or not overcome, what the critical success factors were etc. The idea is for others to profit from experience. The rough length of the learning paper will be agreed upon individually. It should, however, be in a publishable form. The Foundation collects these papers and publishes them over time either in appropriate media, in an in-house newsletter or on the internet.
  2. if possible to give a talk on your learning paper at conferences that the Foundation organizes occasionally and that are attended by other Foundation alumni or the general public. In this way, we hope to contribute to an exchange of ideas and experiences in the field of interdisciplinarity, which will also be made available to the general public. Your participation in such conferences will be subject to separate financing by the Foundation.