On the third day of IT Arena 2026, at Leopolis Hotel in Lviv, WIN2EDIH ran a side-event built around one practical question: how do you actually turn a grant call into funding? The meetup, “Guide to Grants: Your Roadmap to European Funding,” doubled as the launch of our own Guide to Grants — a handbook on European and national grant funding for Ukrainian startups, SMEs, and public institutions. Fill in the short form below to get your copy.

On stage were people who see grant funding from both sides of the table — the funder’s and the applicant’s:

• Olena Voroshylova, Head of Partnership and International Cooperation at the Ukrainian Startup Fund
• Polina Omelianenko, Project Lead at the Ukrainian Startup Fund and Lead of the Support to Find Investments track at WIN2EDIH
• Anna Aliieva, Chief Finance and Fundraising Officer at Sirocco Energy
• Alina Kotii, Head of Marketing at Cliniccards
• Sergiy Tkhorenko, CEO and Founder of MARVILON

What came up again and again: stripped of jargon, the panel’s advice on turning a grant application into a funded project comes down to a handful of practical habits.

• Choose strategically. Before you start writing, make sure the call actually fits your project — the problem, objectives, and methodology should be clear and easy to follow, not stretched to match the funder’s wording.
• Build a coherent proposal and a real team. Every section of the application should tell the same story, and the people named in it — from your organization and your partners — should genuinely be the ones contributing the expertise it promises.
• Make the budget realistic. Funding should follow the planned activities, effort, responsibilities, and timeline — never the other way around.
• Think about delivery and reporting from day one. Reporting requirements are easiest to meet when project managers, finance, and legal are already talking about them before the application is even submitted.
• Plan for impact beyond the grant. Know who your results are for, share them, and collect feedback — the value a grant creates should outlast the funding period itself.

Everything from the meetup is now written up in the guide, along with a lot more: how grant funding works, the different types of grants and donors, how the systems in Ukraine, Europe, and the US compare, and a full walkthrough of writing, budgeting, and managing a proposal, with templates included.

Fill in a few details below and we’ll send your copy straight to your inbox.

Co-funded by the European Union under Grant Agreement No. 101191647. Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only.