We have started the Design You City/Village initiative almost an year back to bring together Entrepreneurs, developers , designers, professionals, academicians and concerned citizens to build solutions for the society. There can be wide ranging solutions for various problems existing in the society - education, civic issues, healthcare, employment, sanitation and many others. The cities have several issues that need immediate intervention. And there are budding entrepreneurs and concerned citizens with ideas that can solve these problems. With Design Your City/Village programs n online platform we aim to share and collaborate with communities to come up with ideas and sustainable solutions for the problems faced by different communities.

Why Design Your City ?

At eChai Ventures, we are constantly working on finding or building solutions for the various problems of the society - we experimented with various models - ShareYourBooks - Book Sharing platform, Encups - Environment Friendly & Economically viable Cups , Leverage - Rural BPO, Blood10 project - Intelligent blood donors portal, Education10 project - Transforming education eco-system and many others. However all these projects didn't really shaped up well or didn't turned out the way we wanted. Though we kind of succeeded with Sweetly & eChai's social network of entrepreneurs who believe in #CoRise - as in we are still actively pursuing them, both of them have the some sort of a social impact and both of them have reached the some sort of maturity stage where these initiatives can sustain on their own.

One of the interesting thing that happened during our journey of more than 6 years, eChai is evolving into something much more than just our initiative - it has now become kind of pioneering platform which connects many entrepreneurs from all over the world, works with reputed institutions and industry associations from all across and generates lot of interest among entrepreneurial community.

Coupled with this realization of what eChai will become and our earlier experiments which didn't really sustained - we thought of combining both of them and adding the experience of what we have learned - we are starting the - Design Your Ahmedabad Project - which will not just help us realize our dreams but also engage more people to design their own ahmedabad with eChai community.

Design Your Ahmedabad @ HappyStreets :

We'll have awesome people from Ahmedabad who are building solutions for Ahmedabad to share their insights and engage with participants.

- Kinjal Shah, Founder, Shwas
- Amit Panchal, Co-Founder, BloodMonk
- Rihaan Patel, Founder, Lost & Found
- Hardika Patoliya, Founder, PH Designs
- Arihant Chopra, Co-Founder, Intelligent Iditors
- Nihar Thakkar, Co-Founder, GyanConnect

We'll also have group of kids from Shwas joining us tomorrow at Design Your Ahmedabad at HappyStreets. During the Design Your Ahmedabad @ HappyStreets - participants will discuss about various problems and possible solutions for the betterment of city and these ideas will be supported by eChai Ventures and partners. In some cases, it may happen that the person who gave the idea/solution would want to support someone else who is already executing or trying to building a solutions around it. At eChai, we are building interesting online-offline platform to connect like-minded individuals and enable more collaboration among them.

For example, eChai Ventures has already collaborated for one such initiative - BloodMonk - with LetsNurture, Founded by an entrepreneur Ketan Raval & our friend Amit Panchal where those with requirement for blood can interact on a single platform.This is also available to all blood donors on the go. If someone is in need of blood at Vastrapur, he/she will be able to find a list of ‘bloodmonks’ registered in Vastrapur area. These monks are also felicitated and their inspiring stories put up on BloodMonk website.

Watch this inspiring short-film about BloodMonk initiative : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUXmcG537QE

Some examples of the problems that can be solved :

- Good, clean public washrooms in the city. Offices with creches so that working moms are a relieved lot. Disabled friendly pathways and an exclusive for-women-by-women cab service. Non-alcohol pubs where like-minded people could hang out after work. Swimming pools that are open throughout the day so that working women could have access to them. A crowd-funding network to help needy students pay their fees...so on and so forth.

- Finding a bus at midnight has always been a problem for people. This is a real-life issue Amdavadis encounter often. An entrepreneur can be of help in this situation if his company takes up the cause as its corporate social responsibility and offers bus services post midnight.

- Suppose, you are somewhere in Mithakali around 3 pm but do not know which eatery to go to for a grub, maybe a techie can design an app that displays a list of eating joints open at that time. The app could also help office-goers get in touch with tiffin service providers in their area.

Checkout more ideas @ http://echai.in/ideas ( You can also share your ideas which you yourself want to execute or ideas which you feel someone really should work on. You can also interact and collaborate with like-minded people over there)

Join us tomorrow morning for 'Design Your Ahmedabad @ HappyStreets :

Venue : HappyStreets, C G Square, C G Road, Ahmedabad.
Date: 16th August, Sunday Time : 6.30 am to 8.30 am.

It's open for all. All are welcome!

Also we have added 'Design Your City' element to all our programs where towards the end of the program we ask participants to share some of the problems that they feel should be solved and what could be the potential solution for it. It helps us build the greater support system to support initiatives of people doing great work for the system as generally if someone shares a problem in the society and potential solution - chancing of them actively supporting some other solutions would be pretty high.

And we will build "Design Your Ahmedabad @ HappyStreets" as a weekly program - where will have participants sharing their ideas/solutions for various problems they feel must be solved and also we will have some inspiring people to share their stories of how are they bringing the change in the society by successful executing social good projects/ventures.

For more information you can contact Jatin Chaudhary, CoRiser & Salesman, eChai Ventures at [email protected] or 08238969939.
More @ http://echai.in/ideas