Request for Collaboration:
Enabling collaboration as a way of working in India’s urban ecosystem
Request for Collaboration:
Enabling collaboration as a way of working in India’s urban ecosystem
The Requests for Collaboration (RFC) is an initiative by U-CAN that explores how organisations can move from intent to practice when it comes to collaboration – through experimentation, reflection, and shared learning
Why Should Organisations Collaborate?
Why Does it Matter for Our Cities?
As engines of economic growth, centres of opportunity, and home to an increasing share of the population, cities are central to India’s future. But they also face deeply interconnected challenges. Challenges which overlap and reinforce one another.
The ecosystem of organisations and individuals working to improve our cities often focus on specific parts of a larger challenge. While this specialisation creates depth and credibility, it can also mean that actors working toward similar goals rarely have structured opportunities to combine their strengths.
The consequences are visible across the urban landscape:
- Similar problems addressed through disconnected efforts
- Duplication of ideas, pilots, and engagement with government stakeholders
- Partial solutions to systemic challenges
- Valuable expertise remaining under-leveraged
- Limited pathways for field-level learning and joint action
No single organisation, however capable, can fully address the complexity of urban challenges alone. Meaningful progress often requires multiple capabilities working together: policy understanding, on-ground relationships, technology expertise, research, communications, financing, and implementation experience. This creates a new imperative for the sector: not just stronger organisations, but stronger collaboration between organisations.
The collaboration conundrum
Most organisations recognise the value of collaboration. But fewer are able to sustain it meaningfully. This is because –
- Funding structures prioritise short-term, project-based outputs
- Organisational systems are optimised for individual delivery, not shared work
- Collaboration requires time, trust, and flexibility—often without immediate returns
As a result, collaboration often becomes transactional (for specific projects), opportunistic (funder-driven), or aspirational (talked about but rarely practiced).
The challenge is not willingness, but it is the absence of designed pathways for collaboration. It was in response to this challenge that Requests for Collaboration (RFC) was conceived: an effort to explore how organisations can translate intent to collaborate into structured, actionable ways of working together.
Centre Collaboration and Innovation
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.
Adopt a Systems Thinking Approach
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.
Build a Culture of Learning and Reflection
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.
What is the RFC initiative?
The Request for Collaboration was created by U-CAN to explore what it takes to move collaboration from intent to practice. Rather than prescribing solutions, the RFC was designed to enable conditions where collaboration could emerge and evolve organically. The RFC reframes collaboration from a deliverable, to a process, to a way of working.
Core objectives
Enable early-stage collaboration
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Support organisations to jointly explore ideas without rigid deliverables
Support experimentation and learning
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Allow teams to iterate and adapt as insights emerge
Build collaborative capacity
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Help organisations learn how to work across boundaries
Why was the RFC created?
In collaborative initiatives, less visible forms of value are often as significant as formal outputs. Traditional programme evaluation tends to prioritise measurable outputs and predefined indicators. However, work that spans organisational boundaries, particularly in complex systems, often produces outcomes that are relational, cognitive, and emergent in nature.
Outcomes realised by participating organisations –
Stronger cross-domain capabilities
Shifts in mental models
Increased internal buy-in for collaboration
Outcomes realised by U-CAN –
Proof of its role as a catalyst and convenor
A practice-informed understanding of collaboration
Strengthened ecosystem positioning
Outcomes for the Ecosystem –
A real example of collaboration in practice
A potential digital public good
Movement from “collaboration as aspiration” to “collaboration as practice”
A Practice-informed framework for collaboration
The RFC has created an opportunity to observe how collaboration unfolded through the first phase of the initiative, and inform the creation of a practice-informed framework that will evolve with the RFC initiative in subsequent phases.
The framework is organised across three parts:
Signals or pre-conditions of readiness
- There is shared curiosity, not just shared solutions
- Organisations recognise complementary strengths
- There is trust at the leadership level
- A catalytic trigger enables action
- Organisations have internal capacity to collaborate
Where collaboration creates value
- Designing solutions using multiple capabilities
- Building a field-level understanding
- Setting a joint agenda
- Experimenting in uncertain problem spaces
The collaboration journey
- Idea Incubation
- Ways of Working
- Joint Execution
- Value Creation
Collaboration is not linear; it is relational, iterative, and evolving.
Join the conversation
Contact Us at connect@urban.org.in