Olga Alexeeva

Catching the ‘up’ moment on the roller coaster ride

My most memorable encounter with a donor client happened around ten years ago, in my native town of Krasnodar in the south of Russia. Briefly, Krasnodar is a 300-year-old provincial city near the Black Sea, very conservative, very religious and deeply rooted in the black soil on which it was built. The potential client, a heavily built, grim-looking man, was a wealthy agricultural ‘oligarch’, a local entrepreneur.