Oorvani Foundation

Oorvani is a non-profit trust set up to ensure independent community-funded media. They have built a citizen-centred and citizen-driven platform in collaboration with citizens, domain experts and journalists to create a democratisation of information. They enable citizens to define what issues are important to them, and to exchange knowledge and strategies on civic organising. They believe every citizen can become a changemaker if knowledge, understanding and tools are placed in their hands.

Key areas of their work are policy change, community action, open knowledge, and fixing information asymmetry.

They support Citizen Matters, which is a knowledge exchange with insight reports on critical urban issues, ideas and solutions for cities. They support OpenCity, a civic tech project that helps public data on cities be available, discoverable, easily accessible, shareable, understandable, and analysable. They publish India Together, an electronic journal for development communication, public affairs, policy, and related issues.

What excites us about their work:

• Pioneers in building a citizen-driven model for engagement with civic and democratic issues
• Inculcating a sense of accountability and power in citizenry to take ownership of their neighbourhoods and the narratives around governance.
• Make available data and research for citizens to actively engage in and contribute to public discourse on key issues of development and policy
• Building a networked platform to scale the relevance of citizen accountability and create a systemic movement in the spirit of ‘everyone is a changemaker’