Ukrainian Cultural Foundation (UCF)

The UCF was created by a 2017 law as a budget institution and a legal entity of public law. Its work is steered and coordinated by the Ministry of Culture, but it is not a ministry department: the model is built so that support decisions rest with experts.

Conditions are set by the lot, not by the Foundation

This is the central misunderstanding in material about the UCF. The sentence "the UCF requires N% co-financing" is wrong by construction: the requirement is set per lot and ranges from zero to 30%.

Eligibility is likewise defined per programme. There is no Foundation-wide list of who may apply.

The practical conclusion: read the applicant instructions for your lot, not the general pages.

Co-financing means money only

Another departure from European practice. The UCF counts as co-financing only monetary resources from sources other than the Foundation. In-kind contributions – equipment, premises, volunteer work – appear in some lots as a partner contribution but are not co-financing.

Where co-financing is optional it works as a tie-breaker: on equal scores, a project with at least 5% of its own contribution wins.

Who may apply

Legal entities of all forms of ownership – NGOs, municipal institutions, state bodies, private companies – and sole traders. Individuals only in certain lot types, primarily fellowships, and only Ukrainian citizens.

Limits apply: one application package per competitive programme per applicant, extending to legal entities sharing a founder. Even where several of your projects win, the Foundation supports at most three.

All projects are implemented in the state language.

How proposals are assessed

The number of experts depends on the size of the lot: up to UAH 500,000 – three; above that – five, and in that case the highest and lowest scores are discarded, so a single hostile review does not sink a project. One expert scores up to 100 points and a package up to 300, of which 15 points go specifically to the quality of planning and transparency of costs.

There is no fixed pass mark: selection runs down the ranking until the lot budget is exhausted. The same score can pass in one lot and fail in another.

Expert decisions are final and not subject to review, except in cases of conflict of interest.

Reporting: the main difference from European donors

Expectations need resetting here if you are used to EU logic.

Reporting is on actual costs with primary documents – no lump sums, unit costs or flat indirect rates as in Horizon Europe.

An independent auditor's report is mandatory. And here is a trap that costs real money: audit costs may not be paid from the grant. They must come from elsewhere – so you need your own resource even in lots where co-financing is not formally required.

Formal presentation requirements that European donors do not have at all: pages numbered throughout, laced and sealed; volumes over 250 sheets split into parts; materials submitted as hard copies plus a flash drive or external disk, which the Foundation does not return.

Cost ceilings: remuneration of one person capped at UAH 50,000 a month; fixed assets up to UAH 50,000 per unit. Prohibited items include capital repairs and construction, mobile phones and household appliances, catering for project participants and, as noted, the audit itself.

Payments run through the State Treasury, and the Foundation expressly disclaims responsibility for delays on the Treasury's side.

Scale

The Foundation's 2026 budget is around UAH 410.8m, up from UAH 250.7m in 2025. Over eight seasons it has supported more than 2,900 projects across seven sectors.