Healthy Ageing

As more individuals live longer lives, our focus must shift to developing the benefits these additional years can bring. This requires prioritizing health span and functional ability over lifespan, and recognizing that reaching advanced age with good health, autonomy, meaningful relationships and a sense of purpose is what makes a life well lived.

Environments and context influence and interact with our health, and shape functional ability in older age – whether healthy behaviours are easy or difficult, whether opportunities for participation exist, and whether allowing older people to live independently. Functional ability as defined by the WHO’s Decade of Healthy Ageing combines a person’s intrinsic capacity with their environment and their interaction.

We have so far focused on a bio-psycho-social approach to healthy ageing. From 2026 onwards, our focus shifts to a complex systems approach: supporting research on how modifiable environmental and contextual factors interact to shape functional ability in later life. The aim is to enable people to remain healthy, to contribute to society, and to pursue what matters to them for as long as possible.

The healthy ageing program at a glance

We seek research projects that

• Go beyond single-cause thinking. Study how environmental and contextual factors interact to shape functional ability in later life.
• Show the interaction, not just the factor. Capture pathways of risk and resilience, and identify which features are modifiable enough to act on.
• Match method to ambition. Use systems thinking in established designs, or complex-systems methods directly and translate findings into scalable, context-sensitive solutions.

Focus areas

• Changing the narrative of age and ageing
• Heat and out-of-home mobility & activity in later life
• For more information, see pp. 5-6 of the call for proposals.

The call for proposals

• One specific call for proposals every year.
• The full details of the 2026 call for proposals is available here.

Grant size

• Max. CHF 75’000 per year, for projects up to 4 years
• Available overall funding for this call is approx. CHF 2 million

Requirements

• Application requirements are described in the call for proposals pp. 7-8

Next deadline

• 24 November 2026, 23:59 CET, with a final decision in June 2027

Selection procedures:

All applications go through a formal screening by the foundation management. The selection of the applications that will be presented to the board is performed by a scientific committee according to our funding criteria. The foundation board of Velux Stiftung will take the final funding decision. More information is available on our page about the selection procedure.

The priority is set on research addressing neglected issues whose results have a high potential to contribute to change.