The Volkswagen Foundation is an independent, non-profit Foundation under private law with its head office in Hanover. The Volkswagen Foundation is dedicated to the support of the humanities and social sciences as well as science, technology and medicine in higher education and research.

The money spent for grants is earned through investing the capital of the Foundation - currently some 2.1 billion euros. In the 47 years of its existence the Volkswagen Foundation has funded more than 29,000 projects with a total of more than 3.5 billion euros.

The funding provides systematic stimuli: it supports those approaches and developments that address some of the big challenges of our time and provides assistance to academic institutions for the improvement of the structural conditions for their work. The Foundation devotes special attention to the upcoming generation of researchers and to cooperations across disciplinary, cultural and national borders.