Why Communities Lose the Race for Funding Before They Even Apply

Recently, I have been speaking a great deal with community heads, starostas, and managers of municipal enterprises. Sooner or later, almost every conversation turns to the same subject - money.

• There are plenty of donors, but somehow their funding never reaches us.

• There are plenty of grants, but the same communities always win.

• Nobody knows about us.

I admit that at first I also thought the system was unfair. But the more closely you look at how modern funding works, the clearer it becomes that the problem often arises long before a community opens a grant application form.

The world has changed. And the rules have changed with it.

There was a time when you could simply write: "The school needs to be renovated" or "The water supply system needs to be replaced". That was often enough. Today, it is not. Not because the school does not need repairs or the water network is not failing. The people who decide where funding goes no longer look at a single facility. They look at the community as a whole.

They want to know something quite different: why this particular school, how it fits into the development strategy, how many children it serves today and how many it will serve in ten years, what else is planned nearby, how the project will affect the economy, and whether other projects reinforce it.

In essence, they are not evaluating the application. They are evaluating the community's ability to think strategically.

And this is where things get interesting.

Many communities still have a familiar folder - paper or digital - called "Projects". It contains dozens of documents: a community centre renovation, a school reconstruction, a new water main, street lighting, and a sports ground. When a new call for proposals is announced, the documents are pulled out, lightly edited, given a new date and programme name, and submitted.

At first glance, this seems perfectly logical.

But there is one problem.

While the community was still working from its old folder, the rest of the world had moved on to digital project portfolios, analytics, resource maps, development forecasts, and performance indicators. Some communities still collect documents. Others now collect data. Increasingly, that difference determines the outcome.

A representative of an international financial institution once put it very simply: "We cannot invest in what we cannot see."

At first, I found the remark strange.

Then I understood what he meant.

Imagine yourself in his position. More than a thousand communities are competing for attention, and you have only a few minutes to form an impression of each one. Where is the economy strong? Where is land available? Which businesses operate there? What are the demographic trends and risks? Which projects are ready? What are the development priorities? If this information is scattered across different documents or does not exist at all, the community becomes almost invisible. Not weak. Not hopeless. Simply invisible.

And today, invisibility is one of the costliest mistakes a community can make.

We often say that more than 1,400 Ukrainian communities compete with one another for funding. That is not quite true. They compete not only for grants. They compete for attention, trust, investors, businesses, skilled people, and the chance to be among those noticed first.

That is why the competition does not begin when a new programme is announced online. By then, frankly, it is already too late to catch up with those that have spent months or even years preparing systematically: collecting data, setting priorities, analysing needs, building a project portfolio, and learning to speak the same language as potential partners.

Perhaps this is the main change that many have yet to notice.

Today, the winners are not necessarily those who need help most, or even those with the largest budget. Increasingly, funding goes to communities that have learned to be clear, consistent, and predictable in the eyes of an investor.

Perhaps every community should now stop asking, "Where can we find the money?" and ask a more important question: "What does an investor see when they look at our community today?"

The answer often determines whether new investment will arrive in the community in one, two, or five years.

P.S. A Note from the Author

One thought stayed with me while I was preparing this article. Once we understand that modern competition between communities begins long before a grant application is submitted, a practical question follows: how can a community prepare for it systematically?

In my view, separate strategic documents or a collection of project ideas are no longer enough. A community needs an operating system for funding readiness: an up-to-date digital profile, verified data, clear priorities, and a project portfolio showing what is ready for implementation, what still needs work, and what result each investment will produce.

A potential partner should be able to find answers within a few minutes: What challenges and opportunities does the community face? Which projects are genuine priorities? How do they connect to the development strategy? Which resources are already available, what is still missing, and what economic, social, or environmental impact is expected?

That is how trust is built - not through grand promises, but through clear reasoning, verified data, and well-prepared decisions.

The idea for Project Navigator grew out of this logic. We never saw it as a service that "finds money." Its purpose is both simpler and more demanding: to help a community become understandable to the people who make funding decisions.

That is why I increasingly believe that the key question for a community today is not "Where can we find the money?" but "What will a potential partner see if they spend ten minutes getting to know our community today?"

If the answer is still unclear, that is exactly where the work should begin.

Ruslan Shcherbakov
Economist, President of the Regional Center for Economic Research and Business Support (RCERBS) Foundation; Coordinator of the Project Navigator, SOMBRILLA, and PARASOL projects

Author's column. The views and conclusions are based on the Foundation team's practical experience working with more than 100 Ukrainian communities on strategic documents, investment project preparation, and international funding.