Challenge statement

The problem: A social worker in Zurich has a client in crisis. She opens a 120-page PDF, scrolls through 180 foundations, guesses which one might fit — and waits 3 months for a rejection. Wrong target group. Start over.

Foundations are drowning in mismatched applications. People in need are drowning in waiting time.

The solution: FundingNavigator asks 3 simple questions — Who are you? What do you need? How urgent is it? — and returns a ranked list of matching funding sources in seconds. Not just foundations: also crowdfunding, sharing economy, and public programs. One search, the full funding mix.

How it works — 4 real scenarios

• 🔴 Case 1: Single mother, urgent dental bill (CHF 3,200) The system filters for foundations with rolling decisions (2–3 weeks), matches her profile as a Swiss citizen and single parent, and suggests a crowdfunding campaign for the remaining gap. Time saved: weeks.
• 🟡 Case 2: Social worker needs education funding for a young refugee The client has permit B and partial scholarship funding. FundingNavigator filters out foundations that exclude non-Swiss applicants, finds those that explicitly welcome migrants, and flags that a supplementary scholarship request is possible. No more blind applications.
• 🟢 Case 3: NGO seeking CHF 25,000 for a mentoring project The system builds a blended funding plan: foundation grant + crowdfunding + municipal integration credit. It checks submission deadlines against the project timeline. Strategic, not random.
• 🟠 Case 4: Refugee family needs furniture + deposit for their first apartment FundingNavigator goes beyond cash: it finds free furniture on sharing platforms within 15km, connects to a Brockenhaus starter kit program, AND matches two foundations for the financial gap. The full spectrum.

What we build at the hackathon

1. Structured dataset — 180 foundations extracted from the ZHAW PDF into searchable JSON
2. Guided questionnaire — 3-step needs assessment
3. RAG-based matching engine — ranked results with match scores
4. Urgency filter — because when you're in crisis, 3 months vs. 3 weeks changes everything

Impact

Fewer rejected applications. Faster help for people in crisis. Less admin burden on foundations. And an architecture that scales to all 26 cantons.

Let's turn a PDF into a lifeline. 🧭

• See also: Challenge slides (PDF)
• Data source: https://www.zhaw.ch/de/sozialearbeit/zuerich-sozial#c219512