Apart from our four weekly programs in Ahmedabad - eChai RoundTable in association with GBG Ahmedabad & GTU Innovation Council on Tuesdays, #CoRise in association with VentureStudio, eChai Sales Evenings in association with Infigic, eChai UX Mornings in association with AllEvents.in - now on wards we will host weekly "Design Your Ahmedabad @ HappyStreets" from 7.30 am on wards.
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 :
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.
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.
Join us tomorrow morning for 'Design Your Ahmedabad @ HappyStreets :
Venue : C G Square, C G Road
Date: 16th August, Sunday Time : 6.30 am to 8.30 am.
We'll have awesome people from Ahmedabad who are building solutions for Ahmedabad to share their insights and engage with participants.
It's open for all. All are welcome!
For more information you can contact Jatin Chaudhary, Co-Founder & Salesman, eChai Ventures at [email protected] or 08238969939.
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.
eChai is an offline-online social network of entrepreneurs who believe in Co.Rise. — Collaboratively rising together. eChai helps entrepreneurs to connect with each other with offline events and online co.rise social network. It’s a platform to share insights, have discussions, to collaborate with fellow entrepreneurs, and help each other to grow and succeed in their ventures.
Offline Social Network part :
- We host quarterly eChai Demo Days - which is the quarterly showcase of innovative products & ventures in front of the large entrepreneurial community. eChai Demo Day provides an opportunity to entrepreneurs, mentors, investors, professionals, and students to share, connect and collaborate with each other. We also host eChai Women In Business n eChai Business For Good programs. All these programs do 3 things well - they provide an opportunity to young entrepreneurs to showcase what are they upto, platform for experienced/successful entrepreneurs share their experiences and insights and it gives a feel of being part of the community.
- Theme-based knowledge/insights sharing sessions - Team Building, Growth Hacking, UI/UX, Sales, Communications, Digital Media, Legal & IP & many others.
- Skill-based challenges/hackathons - eChai App Challenge, Marketing Challenge, Content Challenge, UI/UX Challenge, Business Model Challenge, Business Case Challenge etc.
- Sector specific eChai RoundTables - Agriculture, Cleantech, Healthcare, Internet of Things, Food & Beverages, Sports, Media & Entertainment, Education, Arts & Culture, SMAC & many others.
- eChai After Hours aims to engage entrepreneurs, professionals and students to find solutions for other's businesses challenges in a collaborative way. At eChai After Hours entrepreneurs present their business model, their work culture and couple of significant challenges they are facing / struggling with or want to have people come up with better solutions for that. It can be anything – design challenge, business challenge, tech challenge, people challenge.
eChai After Hours is an amazing way to foster the collaboration among entrepreneurs, as they would be spending significant time and energy to help the fellow entrepreneurs.
Online social network part :
- Explore the sector wise list of entrepreneurs from the community
- Find people with same interest areas and skills set. Now that we will be hosting offline eChai programs across 100 Cities and all over the world - it will be interesting to get connected with people from the community across the world.
- Write insightful posts on eChai.in & your recommendations i.e. from where I get my business card printed, from where I get travel service provider for our group travel for eChai Diaries, our preferred hosting provider, our preferred CA and many others.
- eChai Interviews where you can ask a public question to any entrepreneur just like the QnA at eChai programs.
- Talent and Offers section where you can post your talent requirement and offers for the community.
- Featuring entrepreneurs daily with their detailed interview and what kind of support they seek from the community.
- You can follow particular entrepreneurs and get regular updates.
- We are working on a #CoRiseWall where once in a week you can post a significant update from your side which you really want to share with large number of people from the community i.e. Product Update, Hiring Requirement, Company Culture etc. - #CoRiseWall will be prominently displayed in eChai.in and showcased at eChai programs for more visibility.
- Online eChai Skills Challenges - App Challenge, Marketing Challenge, Business Model Challenge, Content Challenge etc.
- An online eChai Demo Day - where we will have 10 entrepreneurs building interesting and innovative businesses from 10 different cities/countries presenting their ventures in front of the community. We will select these 10 demo companies who will present about their ventures online ( 5 mins ) which will be followed by an interactive dialogue ( 10 Mins ) and also each of these company will will have other 20+ people from their city who'll be physically participating the program along with the demo company of the respective city. Basically they can have the good conversations after the online demos get over. This one will be broadcasted online at http://YouTube.com/eChaiTV and we'll build an interesting thing for Co.Rise. at http://eChai.in/ for better engagement among participants.
- Better integration with online-offline eChai programs.
Along with the Online social network part and offline social network part we have 3 initiatives as part of eChai Ventures.
Sweetly - where we enable 50+ rural women living in Dangs District, Gujarat to make hand-made jewelry and market these products in US & Canada. These 50+ Rural women get some sort of economic benefits from this venture and we run it as full fledged for-profit venture.
Design You City/Village - aims to 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 city has 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.
The Loo Project - helps you find clean loo around you by creating digital public toilet map. It Includes public toilets and shops, cafes, institutions which can let anyone use their facilities. The Information is gathered by Municipal Corporations, Village Councils, Open Government Data, Partner organizations, and citizens.
Mapping of data is just the beginning and there are many amazing things can be done once we have that data. 'Design Your Loo' initiative to bring people together to build affordable toilets and coming up with actionable data insights to build solutions for public toilets and sanitation.
eChaiTV : A web television featuring inspiring entrepreneurs.
Initially when we started up six years back, we used to eChai meetups at roadside Tea Stalls. When we started getting momentum we started hosting eChai programs at friends' office premises. They were pretty generous to extend their resources for our programs. After some time we started collaborating with educational institutions, industry associations and incubators to host our programs. earlier collaborated with some of India’s most prestigious educational institutions ( MICA, IIM Ahmedabad, S P Jain Institute of Management & Research, Vivekanand Education Society, Entrepreneurship Development Institute, Ahmedabad ( EDI ), CEPT University, icreate, Nirma University, NID and many others ) and industry associations & accelerators ( Assocham, CII, GCCI, FICCI, Startup Oasis, TLabs, IAMAI, Sankalp Forum, and many others ) for various entrepreneurial programs.
If we count the number of cities where we have a presence ( 30+) and the cities where we will be launching eChai chapters in upcoming couple of months ( 20+) - we'll have presence in 50 Cities in India.
In last 6 months we've also led a delegation of entrepreneurs to Singapore, Sri Lanka and Bhutan to explore the possible collaboration opportunities and connect with the entrepreneurs from all over the world.
We are pretty hopeful to have #eChai100Cities by the end of the year 2015 to spread the idea of doing good things.
eChai more like a gSchool - A School of Doing Good Things which has #CoRise - Collaboratively Rising Together in it's DNA.
