Who Gets Left Out of Funding? What Ukrainian Disability Organizations Can Teach Us About Accessible Grantmaking

Funders often assess accessibility by asking applicants about their experiences. But what about organisations that never apply in the first place? Based on research among organisations of persons with disabilities in Ukraine, this article examines how application processes can create barriers to participation and what funders can do to reach the organisations whose voices are most often left unheard.

The organisations that disappear from the data

Earlier this year I asked 79 Ukrainian organizations of persons with disabilities (OPDs) about their experience with donor funding. One answer has stayed with me since. 56% said they had decided, at least once, not to apply for money they wanted and needed – not because they were ineligible, but because after reading the requirements they decided they would not make it. 

44 organizations. None of them appears in any funder’s rejection statistics, so for donors they simply don’t exist.

I work for a donor. We can all tell you who applied to us, who we funded, and who and why we rejected. Almost none of us can tell you who read our call, thought about it, and quietly closed the tab. That is the part of the data nobody has.

Looking beyond applications and statistics

This research was my final project for the Swedish Academy of Young Professionals at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute – a survey across more than 20 regions of Ukraine, three online meetings with leaders of national and regional OPDs and coalitions, and a conversation with the European Disability Forum for a view from outside the country.

Before I started working in human rights, I trained as a psychologist. I think that background shaped how I approached the issue. Psychologists look not only at what people do, but also at what they don’t do. In funding, most of what matters turns out to be an absence – and absences don’t appear in statistics.

Personally, I expected paperwork to be the biggest issue. Everyone in this sector has spent a decent amount of time simplifying forms. But I was surprised. I asked organizations to rate how hard each stage of applying is, from one to five. Administrative and reporting requirements came out easiest of the seven stages. Not hardest, easiest!

The hardest was writing in a language other than Ukrainian. Second hardest was finding a donor whose priorities actually match the needs. So the main barrier arises at an earlier stage, before anyone opens a form. We have been fixing the wrong end of the process – politely, diligently, and for years.

Accessibility barriers start before the application form

It would be easy to say that all this is a wartime problem, but the organizations themselves told me otherwise. Many have been working for twenty years or more, and they described donor misunderstanding as something that long predates 2022. The war did not create these barriers, but raised the price of every one of them – and it did that at the moment these organizations became the ones delivering services the state can no longer reach.

And then there is a quieter version of the same problem. Accepting applications in Ukrainian still isn’t the whole answer. Deaf-led organizations told me that for many of their members, Ukrainian Sign Language is a first language and written Ukrainian is a second one, learned at school and rarely used since. One national association existed for two decades without running a single project.

What eventually worked was quite simple. The branches asked a partner organization to handle the applications and reports, while they focused on delivering the work.

I don’t think donors can realistically accept applications in sign language. But we could stop insisting that the organization doing the work has to be the same organization that writes about it. Partnerships should be a normal way to apply and the time someone spends writing on another organization’s behalf should be a fundable cost, not a favour. So, the capacity was never missing there, but the format was.

When organisations stop applying

This is where I find myself thinking like a psychologist again. Among the organizations I surveyed, 71% said fewer than half their applications succeed. For 42%, it is fewer than one in four. More than half had submitted six or more applications in two years. A third had submitted more than ten. When repeated efforts fail to make a difference, people stop making the effort. That is one of the sturdiest findings in psychology. These organizations have run the experiment many times and their conclusion is correct.

The 56% who stopped applying do not lack ambition. They have learned something true about the system and adjusted accordingly. Which means the answer isn’t encouragement, it’s changing how the system works.

What donors get right and where they fall short

To be fair to donors: a quarter of the organizations I surveyed said a donor-driven change had made their work better. One redesigned a training for people with intellectual disabilities into plain language and visuals, because a funder asked, and brought families into the process while they were at it. Another told me the people they serve had moved from being participants to being speakers, organisers and decision-makers. That is funding conditions doing exactly what they should – strengthening an organization’s own mission rather than bending it.

We have a gap between what we expect from others and what we do ourselves. We require accessible materials inside a project, but run an application process a blind applicant cannot read, and a selection stage that offers no support to someone with an intellectual disability who wants to compete for the grant. We ask for accessibility, but we don’t always practise it.

Why this matters beyond Ukraine

This matters more than it used to. Ukraine is negotiating EU accession with fundamental rights in the first cluster, and the standards being set now will outlast the war by decades. When international funders run processes that exclude people with disabilities, we are not only losing good applicants. We are showing a government in the middle of reform what the acceptable standard looks like.

Listening to the organisations that never applied

If I could ask donors to change one thing, it would be this: survey the people who didn’t apply.  It costs almost nothing and any funder could do it next quarter. The reasons are specific and can be addressed – no co-financing capacity, no English, no specialist finance staff, targets nobody could credibly reach.

One organization described a call requiring 300 unique beneficiaries. In their region, the entire target group numbered around 250. No quality of work would have met that threshold. So they didn’t apply, and the call recorded nothing at all.

If you remember one line from this, let it be that donors are not choosing the best organizations. We are choosing the best applications. Those are not the same thing, and the distance between them is where good money quietly goes wrong. One respondent put it better than I can: “When international standards say ‘ensure inclusivity’, they often picture modern European cities. In war-damaged towns and remote villages, inclusion means your interviewers taking a tablet and walking to every person with a disability’s home, spending twice the time the terms of reference allow.” That organization will never write the most polished proposal, but they will do the best work. Our job is to build a process that can tell the difference.

About the author

Olesia Lyndova is a Programme Coordinator and Thematic Advisor at Abilis Foundation. Her work focuses on disability rights, inclusion, and disability-inclusive development cooperation. This article draws on research she carried out as her final project for the Swedish Academy of Young Professionals at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute, examining how donor funding works for organizations of persons with disabilities in Ukraine.