Mission Statement: Fostering Young Talent

Our scholarship principles

• We regard promoting young talent as a way of contributing to the development of democratic culture.
• Our scholarship policy combines the principle of outstanding academic achievement with equal opportunities. This is expressed particularly in our desire to support previously under-represented target groups.
• We attach special importance to gender-democratic and intercultural issues as part of our non-material/intellectual support. Attention to and respect for diversity are constitutive elements of our scholarship practice.
• Our scholarship offers both financial (scholarship, research and study allowance, foreign study grants) and intellectual support (accompanying programme, networking, advice).
• Our scholarships and accompanying programme are guided by the idea of sustainability. One of the focal points of the supporting programme is education with regard to sustainable development. For our doctoral scholarships, projects in transformation and sustainability research are particularly welcomed.
• We support young people in their personal development, promote the acquisition of cross-disciplinary skills, and encourage interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary dialogue.
• We create forums for debate and collaboration between students, newly qualified academics, former scholarship holders, established researchers, and Green politicians. We promote the formation of Green networks on a national, European, and international level.
• We emphasise the spirit of participation and seek to foster our scholarship holders’ sense of initiative, responsibility, and participation in decision-making. We expect our work with our scholarship holders to be constructive, solution-oriented and goal-oriented, and we encourage a culture of communication that contributes to this objective.

Our target groups

• We support undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students who commit to the goals of the Green project, share the fundamental values of the Heinrich Böll Foundation – democracy, ecology, solidarity and non-violence – and take an active role on a sociopolitical level.
• We support undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students from all subjects and all types of higher-education institutions. In addition to our existing focus on the humanities, social sciences and art, we are expanding our support for previously under-represented areas such as economics, law, engineering, media studies, and natural sciences. We place special emphasis on supporting students from universities of applied sciences.
• Our scholarship holders include a particularly high proportion of women.
• We give special support to women in those subjects where they have previously been under-represented. This applies particularly to the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, mathematics).
• Our programme also emphasises the support for members of ethnic minorities and first-generation students.
• We support undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students from all the German Länder (federal states). We plan to continue increasing the proportion of scholarship holders from eastern Germany.
• We support international scholarship holders from all over the world, especially young people from eastern and south-eastern Europe, the EU’s neighbouring states and the CIS, the Arab world/Middle East and transition countries and conflict regions worldwide.

Our expectations: Fostering young talent by fostering personalities

• We expect applicants to have performed outstandingly in their university studies and to show social commitment, political interest, and reflection on the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s goals and values.
• Among the applicants, we look for individuals who are politically committed and aware and interested in Green ideas;
• original and independent thinkers;
• intellectually curious;
• team players, good communicators, able to deal with conflict, and solution-oriented;
• goal-oriented and ambitious in their plans for their own future;
• self-reflective and self-critical;
• socially minded, with gender-democratic and intercultural competence;
• internationally oriented.
• We offer space for creative thinking and the exchange of political ideas within a stimulating culture of discussion that is shaped by mutual respect and fair-minded interaction.

Our alumni programme

• We offer our alumni a wide-ranging programme of services and events, help them to make contact with each other, and provide a communication platform for professional networking.
• When our scholarship holders have completed their studies, we encourage them to work actively for the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s fundamental principles in their capacity as experts and leaders in research, politics, the media, business, and society. We support them in this aim by means of a mentoring programme and other services.
• We hope that the former scholarship holders will give us their assistance as material and non-material/intellectual supporters of the Foundation.

First drafted: November 2004; revised: December 2015; February 2023