Grant Activities

The Toyota Foundation’s grant programs for fiscal 2011 consist of five programs, based on its Vision 2010: Building a Better Future.

Program Objectives

Grant Program for Community Activities

This program is limited to activities in Japan.

In keeping with our theme “Inheriting, Constructing and Tying the Local Community:　Cultivating　Self-supporting Communities", we are supporting ambitious approaches that, while firmly grounded in the community character, breed independent initiative, forge mutual ties, and help to resolve local issues. This fiscal year, we have instated a special program exclusively for areas and people victimized by the Great East Japan Earthquake. Its thrust is support for activities aimed at the rebuilding of lives as well as the revival and reconstruction of local communities.

Asian Neighbors Program

Based on the theme of “Shared Actions to Build Our Future Asia,” the program provides support for projects to help solve commonly faced problems through close cooperation. Our hope is for the Asia in which we live to be even more richly endowed with new, open networks among people, and to become a place in which people can develop themselves together and find joy and hope in their daily lives. To this end, we seek projects that can present new lifestyles and innovative social models for the sake of future generations.

Research Grant Program

Based on the theme of “Exploring Knowledge to Build a Better Future,” the program provides support to research projects that seek to uncover new relations among people, as well as connections between people and culture and people and nature, and those that bring about a spiritually richer society in which people sustain each other by forming such links. In particular, the program targets research projects with important social significance that adopt a pioneering stance based on flexible ideas that are not limited by existing frameworks.

Communication with Society Program

This Foundation-driven program, which provides funding only to past grant recipients, is aimed at promoting the results of past projects funded by Toyota Foundation grants.

Initiative Program

This Foundation-driven program primarily supports the following sorts of projects.
-- Projects undertaken in partnership with the Toyota Foundation’s own survey activities or study groups
-- Initiatives that strengthen and develop the NPO sector as a whole by bolstering the organizational and activity foundations for private-sector NPO organizations
-- Initiatives that address socially important issues that are difficult to support via the application-based programs
-- Other initiatives that are recognized to be particularly urgent