No deadlines. The clock starts when you write.
The foundation funds work on the Tajik-Persian language and the record of its literature — gathering it, translating it, counting it, and carrying it into machine-readable form. Applications are read as they arrive, all year, and decided case by case against a sum set aside for the year.
Ариза бо забони тоҷикӣ, форсӣ, русӣ, ӯзбекӣ ё англисӣ қабул карда мешавад.
Applications are accepted in Tajik, Persian, Russian, Uzbek or English.
Things we would pay to know
A grants page usually runs on a deadline. This one runs on a list. These are open questions in the record — some about Zehni, some about the language — that the foundation would fund an answer to. Take one, or bring your own. When someone takes a question we mark it, so you can see what is already being worked on. The list predates the desk — these have been open in the record since April.
Six things, in this order
- Does it leave something citable? A published article, a deposited dataset, an archived recording, a printed translation. We do not fund work that ends in a private PDF.
- Is it in a gap? Proximity to one of the standing questions above is the strongest single signal in your favour.
- Is it open? Public deposit, an open licence, and no outcome that lives only behind a paywall.
- Can you do it? One comparable finished thing, at any scale. A student newspaper piece counts. A blog post counts.
- Does the money change the outcome? We fund the difference between a thing happening and not happening.
- Care for living people. Consent, safety and attribution. Decisive for oral history; weighed everywhere.
Affiliation is not a criterion. Neither is a degree, a letterhead, an h-index, or the fluency of your English. A university’s name will not make us more impressed.
The process, in full
Awards are scaled to the work
There are no published bands, because each award is set against what the piece of work actually costs. Most are the cost of one person’s time for a few weeks, plus whatever they must travel to or pay for. You tell us what it needs; we will tell you what we can do.
Budgets should reflect where the work happens. We will not think less of a small one. A month in an archive in Dushanbe and a month in an archive in Cambridge do not cost the same, and we do not expect them to be priced as though they did.
Payment by bank transfer or Wise. Where transfer genuinely fails, in-country cash against receipt. Half on start and half on delivery, or the whole amount up front for smaller awards.
Payment law binds us. If you are somewhere our bank cannot reach — and there are such places in this region — tell us early and we will say plainly whether we can pay you at all, before you write anything.
The money is the Zehni family’s, and no one in it may apply for a penny of it. The foundation disburses from a fixed sum set aside each year, which is why awards are decided one at a time rather than in rounds, and why the desk can close when that sum is committed. If it closes it says so above, and everything already received is still read and answered.
Plainly
- Anyone, anywhere, over 18 — any affiliation or none
- Students at any level, journalists, independent scholars, engineers, teachers, librarians, archivists
- Individuals and small teams — name one lead
- People already funded elsewhere, where this is a distinct piece of work
- Work published under a pen name. Zehni used five. We must know who we are paying, but the world need not.
- Tuition, course fees or degree funding
- General salary support, or a buy-out longer than the work itself
- Conference travel with no artefact at the end (presenting work we funded is the exception)
- Institutional overhead. We pay for work, not for the building.
- Equipment, unless the equipment is the work — a recorder for oral history is; a laptop is not
- Anything whose only home is behind a paywall
- Publication fees at predatory venues. If we don’t know a journal, we’ll ask you about it before deciding.
- Work already finished — but if it is eighty per cent done and stalled, say so. We sometimes pay to finish and publish.
- Political campaigning. Historical research into repression is squarely in scope — this caution is about advocacy, not about the past.
- Any recording of people who cannot consent
- Sponsorship, prizes for third parties, or re-granting
- Board members, and anyone in Turaqul Zehni’s family — descendants and those who married in alike. The foundation is run by his family; where an applicant is known personally to a reader, that reader steps out and another decides.
One open application at a time, not counting The Single Word. · A decline is not a bar — write again when the idea has changed.
Write to the desk.
The application is short. There is a page that will compose it with you, field by field, and hand you the finished text to send — or you can ignore it and simply write us a letter. Both arrive in the same place and are read the same way.