Rules

Eligibility

You must be a high school student in Canada or the United States, at least 13 years old, and currently enrolled.

The fund supports student-led clubs, hackathons, school events and other shared activities for your school community. You can lead a project yourself; the activity should involve other students, rather than only funding your own individual build.

You can apply on your own or as a team. Whoever submits is the primary applicant: you must meet the rules yourself, and you confirm that everyone you name does too. We do not check each team member separately.

Teams can span schools. The card shows the primary applicant's school.

One application per project per cycle, and one application per student per cycle as the primary applicant.

Every application names an educator at your school. They are emailed only if the project wins, and their reply is what releases the funds.

Key dates

All cutoffs are 11:59 PM Eastern. There is no grace period.

Applications open

Sept 7

Applications and voting close

Oct 31, 11:59 PM ET

All approvals complete

Nov 2

Winner confirmations due

Nov 5

Winners announced

Nov 6

Next cycle opens mid-November, with voting closing at the end of January.

Apply early. Approved projects can collect votes until voting closes. Applying early leaves more time for review and campaigning. Projects approved after voting closes cannot receive votes.

How applications are vetted

A project is not public and cannot collect a vote until it passes two checks.

One: tell us your idea and budget. Supporting links, past-event material and a short video are optional. First-time projects can apply without them. You can choose one link to appear on your full project page after approval; extra supporting links stay private for review. Use a public project or event page without private student information. If you share a video, make sure anyone with the link can watch it.

Two: TKS reviews and approves. We read the card for anything that identifies an individual student and ask you to fix it, we check any media supplied, and we assess the project using internal review criteria. Review takes up to three business days from the day you submit, and every approval is complete by Nov 2. Business days are weekdays, Eastern.

The educator you name is not part of this. Nothing is asked of them unless the project wins, and the rule for that is below.

When you apply you confirm you have the right to the content you submit and agree to it being shown publicly.

How TKS reviews projects

We look for projects that help students in these four ways. Ideally, your idea touches on all four:

• Impact — bring students together and make a difference at your school.
• Creativity — try a new idea or put your own spin on an existing one.
• Career connectedness — help students explore real careers and fields.
• Agency development — help students take initiative, solve problems and build confidence by doing.

If your project does not address any of these areas, TKS may ask you to revise it or decline your application. Community votes decide which approved projects get funded.

Voting

One vote per email address per project. Your vote counts only after you press Confirm in the email we send you.

You can support as many projects as you like, once each.

Arriving at the link never casts a vote. Only the Confirm button does. Links are signed, single-use and expire: a vote link lasts 24 hours, or until voting closes if that comes sooner.

We treat some addresses as the same person, so one person cannot vote twice from variations of one inbox. Rule version 2026-09-03.1:

• We lowercase the whole address.
• googlemail.com addresses are treated as gmail.com.
• On gmail.com we ignore dots and anything after a plus sign in the part before the @.
• On outlook.com, hotmail.com, live.com, yahoo.com, icloud.com, proton.me, protonmail.com, fastmail.com, hotmail.ca, yahoo.ca, outlook.ca, hotmail.co.uk, yahoo.co.uk we ignore anything after a plus sign.
• Every other address is left as typed, apart from case.

We block temporary, throwaway email addresses. If yours is blocked, use a school, work or personal email address.

Each project card shows its current vote total. A confirmed vote counts as 1. If the voter is a confirmed subscriber to Developing Future-Ready Leaders, it counts as 2. For example, 10 regular votes plus 5 double votes gives a project 20 votes. The 5 projects with the highest totals win.

How winners are confirmed

The 5 projects with the most weighted votes win, and each winner's educator confirms by reply before any funds move.

After voting closes we email the educator each winning project named, with the reference code in the subject. They reply to damian@tks.world. There is nothing to click: their reply in their own words IS the confirmation, because school security scanners follow links and do not write replies. Replies are due Nov 5, 11:59 PM ET.

A missed reply is not an appeal. The slot passes to the next project by weighted total, as far as eighth place, and each project is asked once.

A project that receives a passed slot gets three business days from the day we email its educator. Business days are weekdays, Eastern.

If no project down to eighth place confirms, the slot expires. Unfilled slots do not roll over.

A confirmation is one educator's own attestation, and it is also their agreement to receive or route the funds. It is not an endorsement by the school as an institution.

The newsletter double vote

Subscribing to Developing Future-Ready Leaders makes every vote you cast this cycle count twice.

The opt-in sits on the vote form and is unchecked by default.

We send a second, separate email. The subscription counts only after you press Confirm in it. That link lasts 7 days.

Confirm before Oct 31, 11:59 PM ET. Confirming after that still subscribes you, but changes no weights, and the page says so.

Once you confirm, every vote from that address this cycle counts twice — the ones you already cast and the ones you cast later. All weights freeze at the voting cutoff.

Unsubscribing later does not change votes you have already cast. Votes cast after you unsubscribe count once.

Subscription status is per cycle for now, so a voter in the next cycle confirms again.

What removes votes, and what removes a project

TKS removes votes that break these rules, and removes projects that misrepresent themselves. Every removal is recorded with a reason.

What gets votes removed:

• Bot or scripted voting patterns
• Clusters of disposable or alias addresses
• Votes that were bought, traded or otherwise paid for

A removed vote stops counting immediately, including in the number shown on the card.

If two projects tie for the last slot

TKS decides.

There is no automatic tiebreak. If two projects finish level for the fifth slot, TKS makes the call.

When that happens, the Winners page says so, under the fifth winner.

What the money can and cannot be used for

The money is for the project, not for the person running it.

Permitted:

• Event costs
• Materials
• Software
• Venue
• Food
• Prizes

Prohibited:

• Personal enrichment
• Anything unsafe or unlawful
• Political campaigning
• Paying yourself

A winner receives exactly the amount they were approved for, up to $1,000, in the school's local currency — Canadian dollars for a Canadian school, US dollars for a US school. Nothing is converted.

Payments are started within five business days of Nov 6. In Canada we send an e-transfer. In the United States we wire the funds to the school; Venmo is used only for the documented direct-to-student fallback.

We prefer to send the money to the educator who confirmed the project, or to the school. Direct to a student is the fallback, and it needs a written plan for how the funds will be used.

No payment is prepared until the winner's educator has confirmed by email, and when the money goes direct to a student a parent or guardian confirms by email too. Money never moves on a student's own say-so.

After the project runs we ask for a short note on how it went and a photo or a link. It appears on the Winners page.

If a cycle is not full

If fewer projects qualify than there are slots, every project that qualifies wins.

There are 5 slots. Unfilled slots expire; they do not roll over, and an under-requested remainder is simply unspent.

TKS may announce extra award slots in a future cycle, at its own discretion. That is stated here up front and is never adjusted part-way through a cycle.

Withdrawing

You can withdraw your project at any time before the winners are announced.

Withdrawing takes your card down straight away and voids every vote it has collected. It cannot be undone.

Withdraw from the private status link we emailed you when you applied.

Takedown and contact

If anything on this site identifies a student, write to damian@tks.world and it comes down.

No questions asked, and quickly. That is the same address for any question about these rules.

To ask what we hold about you or to have it deleted, see the Privacy page.