Working Across Organisations: What Does It Really Take?

Overview

This session emerged from the first phase of U-CAN’s Request for Collaboration (RFC), an initiative designed to bring organisations together not to deliver predefined solutions, but to explore problems jointly. Praja Foundation and eGov Foundation identified a shared urban challenge: elected representatives often lack access to the data and systems needed to respond effectively to citizen needs. Their collaboration explored what it would take to change that, by imagining a digital interface that could give elected representatives real-time visibility into service delivery while enabling more meaningful citizen engagement. Moderated by U-CAN’s Programs Lead, Akshay Agarwal, the session featured Meghna Bandelwar Indurkar (Praja Foundation) and Gautham Ravichander (eGov Foundation) reflecting on what it actually took to navigate this collaboration.

Moderator: Akshay Agarwal, Lead – Programs, U-CAN

Panelists: 

Meghna Bandelwar Indurkar, Head – Strategic Partnerships, Praja Foundation 

Gautham Ravichander, Director -Policy & Advocacy, eGov Foundation

Key Takeaways:

🔹 The system makes collaboration the harder choice Most organisations operate within tight mandates, and funding for collaboration itself remains scarce, partly because its outcomes are harder to measure. The result is a sector where organisations often end up solving similar problems in parallel, without building on each other’s learnings. As Gautham noted, this isn’t a failure of will; it’s a structural problem that makes going it alone the path of least resistance.

🔹 Collaboration requires internal mindset shifts Partnership doesn’t begin at the leadership level and trickle down; it has to be built across teams. Meghna reflected on the work of bringing people along: adapting ways of working, making space for different organisational cultures, and building confidence at every level. The external collaboration is only as strong as the internal one.

🔹 The process comes with real costs: time and discomfort Both speakers were candid about what collaboration actually feels like from the inside: slower decisions, more ambiguity, and moments that demand real humility, especially when questions of ownership and visibility are still unsettled. These aren’t signs that something has gone wrong; they’re the texture of the work itself.

🔹 Ownership must give way to shared impact Perhaps the deepest shift in this collaboration was in how both organisations came to think about ownership. The goal, as both panelists put it, was never for one organisation to claim the solution. It was for ideas to travel further and be used more widely. Sustaining that orientation is hard in a funding environment that still rewards clear outputs, but it may be exactly what the sector needs more of.