The U-CAN Requests for Collaboration program supports projects that bring member organizations together to tackle complex urban challenges, drive innovation, and create lasting impact in communities across India.
The Requests for Collaboration initiative is designed to enable U-CAN members to actively explore new opportunities for working together beyond their existing partnerships. This initiative, intentionally named Requests for Collaboration, stems from ongoing discussions with ecosystem players—including current members, donor organizations, and others in the broader urban ecosystem—who have emphasized the need for collective action to address systems-level challenges rather than working in isolation.
As a convener within the urban ecosystem, U-CAN plays a vital role in facilitating collaborations between organizations with complementary expertise, knowledge, and experience. Together, they can tackle some of the most pressing issues our cities face today. This initiative provides U-CAN members with an avenue to experiment with and learn from bold, innovative ideas that push beyond traditional partnership boundaries, fostering relationships with like-minded organizations.
This competitive grant, currently available to U-CAN members, is designed to foster meaningful collaboration and innovation across the urban ecosystem. The program focuses on several key areas that guide project selection and support impactful, sustainable outcomes:
We encourage members to pitch joint projects lasting up to nine months, where two or three member organizations work together to pursue shared outcomes aligned with their missions, visions, and interests. To foster out-of-the-box thinking, eligible activities include ideas or projects that may have stalled due to lack of funder interest, are experimental in nature, adopt bold and radical approaches to traditional problems, revisit past initiatives with a strategic lens informed by prior learnings, or represent passion projects of organizational leadership.
Guided by a core belief in the power of collaboration, grant evaluations are based on principles that ensure impactful and sustainable outcomes. These include how collaboration amplifies the project’s impact, how activities build essential skills and sensibilities in the urban sector, what makes the project bold and original, how it contributes to broader learning and application in the urban ecosystem, commitment to transparency and fairness among partners, and a strategic vision for embedding and sustaining the work long term.
Fostering a culture of learning is central to this initiative. Organizations are given space to reflect on their experiences and generate insights that deepen the collective understanding of urban challenges. U-CAN encourages grant applicants to build systems that enable this objective and to create and share knowledge products that benefit the broader ecosystem.
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