Text: Svitlana Prokopchuk
FUNDS HUNTER™ is not just a board game. It is a strategic thinking tool that helps people make decisions faster, take responsibility, and build realistic development trajectories — in life, career, and personal projects. This is exactly why USB views FUNDS HUNTER™ as a practical instrument in its work on accelerating migrant integration, developing integration strategies, supporting youth initiatives, planning self-employment, and fostering small business development.
The game is especially effective in moments of radical change — war, relocation, loss of familiar roles. During such periods, people often formulate their request very simply: “I want money.” Yet they are almost never able to answer another, far more difficult question: “What for?”
It was precisely at this point — the inability to clearly explain one’s own goal — that the story of FUNDS HUNTER™ began.
Drawing on many years of experience in fundraising and strategic consulting — from founding the educational platform Fundraiser and creating the FUNDS HUNTER™ game, to managing the grant ecosystem Synergy Universe and training professionals at Synergy Academy — Svitlana Oliinykova, a fundraising specialist at USB, Stanford program graduate, and expert who has raised over USD 37 million in grant funding, defines FUNDS HUNTER™ not as a game in the classical sense, but as a training simulator for thinking and responsibility.
From Humanitarian Work to a Game
The idea of FUNDS HUNTER™ was not born in theory or in a creative lab. It grew out of practice — rigid, highly regulated, and at times emotionally unbearable.
After the occupation of Donetsk and Luhansk regions and Crimea in 2014, Svitlana worked at CrimeaSOS, an implementing partner of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), managing grant programs for internally displaced persons. Funds were allocated to support business development and improve housing conditions for displaced people from Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.
“When you work with the UN, you must adhere to UN ethical principles — complete neutrality. At the same time, I was forced to leave my hometown of Torez. Emotionally, it was extremely difficult to support even those who were ‘neutral by nature,’ rather than revolutionary or openly pro-Ukrainian activists like myself,” Svitlana recalls.
Her return to the business sector was not an escape, but a return to the tools she knew best: consulting, fundraising, and strategic thinking. It began with individual work, then grew into a team. Later came an educational platform and an academy, created to “grow the grant consulting market.” But at a certain point it became clear that personally guiding everyone through this path was physically impossible.
“I realized I could no longer cover such a number of trainings myself. That’s when I decided to create a game — so knowledge could be absorbed through an interactive, playful format. I teach people and teams how to play, and they learn on their own how to mobilize resources and make decisions,” Svitlana explains.
Why Fundraising Is Not About ‘Filling Out a Grant Application’
FUNDS HUNTER™ was developed over three years together with a team — through focus groups, game practitioners, and dozens of iterations. During this time, the game changed by approximately 80% compared to its initial version. The key realization at its core is simple and uncomfortable: grants are not about applications.
“Filling out a grant application takes a few hours. But it’s not the application that gets evaluated. What gets evaluated is the organization — its goals, its logic of action, its market, and whether it makes systemic mistakes,” Svitlana explains.
The game teaches participants to view their activities strategically: how decisions made in a single hour can affect years ahead, why certain actions can permanently close access to resources, and why ignorance of the rules does not exempt one from consequences.
“The grant market is like Switzerland. There are rules. If you know them and follow them, life is fine. If you don’t — that’s your problem,” she adds.
Money as an Indicator of Responsibility
One of the least obvious yet most critical elements of FUNDS HUNTER™ is the participation fee — even if it is purely symbolic.
“If a person doesn’t invest their own money, responsibility doesn’t arise. Sometimes disputes between players over payment are already part of the game. The ability to pay is also a skill,” Svitlana is convinced.
The philosophy of FUNDS HUNTER™ is simple: in life, you always pay — with money, time, or dependence on others. And very often, money is the lowest of these costs.
Who FUNDS HUNTER™ Is For
FUNDS HUNTER™ is played by startup founders, entrepreneurs, civic activists, social entrepreneurs, scientists, employees, and IT professionals. And, as it turned out, the game works best in mixed groups.
“The world isn’t made up only of startups or only of entrepreneurs. In the game, you see different ways of thinking and learn how to step outside your own vacuum,” Svitlana says.
The game has proven to be universal: it adapts well to different countries, cultures, and professional environments — including people working with turnovers of tens of millions of dollars. There is only one condition without which FUNDS HUNTER™ does not work: a person must be ready to change something, or at least begin making decisions.
Country, language, experience, or status do not matter. What matters is the inner readiness to look at oneself honestly and take responsibility for one’s own steps.
That is why FUNDS HUNTER™ is not a game about money. It is a game about growing up. About the moment when a person stops waiting for a “chance,” a “donor,” or “circumstances” — and begins to build their life strategically and move forward faster.
