Educational grants
“If you want to plan for a year, grow rice. If you want to plan for a decade, plant trees. If you want to plan for a century, educate people.”
What we support?
The Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation provides educational support to residents of the Canton of Berne and so fosters equal opportunity in education. This support is financial in nature and provided on the basis of subsidiarity. This means that we make these grants where the applicants, the canton, the municipalities or other potential sources of funding cannot cover all the costs and additional costs of educational projects. The grants benefit a wide range of educational projects at all levels and stages, e.g.:
- Completion of training courses
- Participation in educational programmes
- Short- to longer-term attendance at courses
Who we support?
Our beneficiaries are people of all ages resident in the Canton of Berne who have special educational needs or are financially constrained, and are motivated to participate in a specific educational project, e.g.:
- Children, young people and young adults whose lack of any or sufficient schooling or vocational training puts them at risk of falling into poverty
- Persons impoverished by their lack of education who wish to undertake vocational training
- Persons who need to catch up on their vocational training because they, for example, have not completed their education in a Swiss school or because they have for some time been unable to complete vocational training
- Persons whose access to further or specialised education is made more difficult by physical handicap or illness
- Persons from an immigrant background living in constrained circumstances and whose opportunities on the labour market are limited because, for example, their educational qualifications or work experience are not recognised or usable in Switzerland
What we don’t fund?
- Time spent studying abroad
- Language courses abroad or in other parts of Switzerland
- Educational trips and sabbaticals
- Degree and diploma theses
- Persons temporarily resident in Switzerland or in the Canton of Berne only for educational purposes
Before submitting the application
We recommend that applicants discuss their educational plans with a specialist (e.g. with an advisor at the Careers Advice and Information Centre (Berufsberatungs- und Informationszentrum – BIZ)).
If you need help processing the online form, you can make an appointment with the office.
What’s meant by “financially constrained”?
When assessing whether someone needs financial support for an educational project, we follow the guidelines of the Swiss Social Assistance Conference (Schweizerische Konferenz für Sozialhilfe – SKOS).