Why are only young people over 18 eligible to enter the contest?  

We recognize individuals under the age of 18 also have excellent “solution ideas”.  However, we are limiting entries to young people between 18 – 35 because we believe these individuals have the highest probability to be able to pivot their work on their ideas if exposure by DaVinci Project opens important impact opportunities for them. 

Importantly, we note there are other excellent environment and climate contests for young people under 18. For example, see The Earth Prize and its review here.

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When are applications due?

Completed applications must be submitted to the Zealous site by the 31st of March, 2023.

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Can applications be made in a language other than English? 

No, we are only able to accept applications in English due to limited resources. Thank you for understanding.

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Why are there so many questions in the Competition Application Pages?

The purpose of these questions are two fold:

1) To allow the contestants to take these broad, open questions into consideration while developing their idea.

2) To give judges further information to help them select candidates for Stage 2 of the contest. Therefore, it is important that the candidates make their responses to all the questions as strong and meaningful as possible. 

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I have an idea but I am not sure that it’s good enough as it stands, is there a way I can contact you with my idea and get some help before I pay the entrance fee and submit it?

Yes, we encourage people with embryonic ideas to directly contact us and we will arrange to help you better formulate your idea and tell you when we think it’s ready to present. In fact, we actively encourage people to do this, first because we have access to people with skill and knowledge levels across a wide field that will be able to give pertinent advice in complete confidentiality, and secondly we don’t want the application fee to be a barrier.   

If you have any further questions, feel free to contact us here.