The U-CAN Requests for Collaboration supports collaborative projects that unite member organizations to address complex urban challenges, foster innovation, and create sustainable impact in communities across India.
The Requests for Collaboration for U-CAN members is designed to enable them to actively explore and seek ways to work together towards a common goal beyond their existing partnerships. The idea of such an initiative, intentionally called Requests for Collaboration, arises from ongoing discussions with ecosystem players including current members, donor organisations and from the broader ecosystem, which have emphasised the need for organisations to be able to work together to solve systems level problems rather than work in isolation.Â
As a convener of organisations in the urban ecosystem, U-CAN’s role in enabling such collaborations can prove vital in developing a successful model where organisations with complementary expertise, knowledge and experience work together to solve some of the most pressing issues our cities face today. This initiative provides an avenue for U-CAN’s members to experiment with and learn from bold and radical ideas that push the boundaries of traditional partnerships and work areas and build relationships with other like-minded organisations.Â
Currently available to U-CAN members, this is a competitive grant where the proposals that best demonstrate the value of collaboration are selected.Â
We encourage our members to pitch a joint project for a duration of up to nine months, wherein two or three member organisations work together to explore activities that can deliver towards a shared outcome in a way that advances the organisations' missions, visions and interests. To encourage out of the box thinking, eligible activities include ideas/projects which have been stalled due to lack of funder interest, which may be experimental in nature, which adopt bold and radical approaches to a traditional problem, reattempting past initiatives with a strategic lens informed by past learnings, or passion projects of the organisation leadership.
Guided by a core belief in the power of collaboration, the evaluation of grants is grounded in key principles that ensure impactful and sustainable outcomes. These include how collaboration amplifies the project's impact, how activities foster essential skills and sensibilities in the urban sector, what makes the project stand out as bold and original, how the project contributes to broader learning and application in the urban ecosystem, commitment to transparency and fairness among collaborating organisations, and a strategic vision to embed and sustain the work in the long term.
Fostering a culture of learning is key to this initiative, where organisations have space to reflect on their experiences and generate insights that deepen the collective’s understanding of urban challenges. U-CAN also encourages organisations applying for the grant to build in systems which will enable this objective, and potentially create and disseminate a knowledge product to benefit the broader ecosystem.
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