Oorvani Foundation is a non-profit committed to civic engagement, citizenship and communities. Our mission is to connect people who want better cities with civic information, tools, networks and resources they need to make it happen.
Our Vision: Empowered citizens making cities and neighbourhoods sustainable, liveable and equitable
Why this initiative
India has 10 cities with 3 million+ population and 50+ cities with a million+ population. Our cities are marked by poor quality of governance, environment, civic provisions and lack of equitable access to resources. Bad public infrastructure and service delivery — be it transport, water supply, roads, or schooling — have made the everyday life of citizens painful.
These urban challenges need collective action to fix them, action that is based on a deep understanding of issues and root causes, and changemaking.
Building a Community of Civic Problem-Solvers
At Oorvani Foundation, we believe that informed, engaged citizens are key to transforming our cities. We enable individuals and communities to navigate the journey from awareness to action through a structured, three-step changemaking process.
How we make it happen
Our offerings bridge knowledge, data, and capacity building:
- Knowledge platforms — Citizen Matters and Open City — enable both engaged citizens and lay people to find answers and insight, and gain deeper understanding of civic issues and individual/community problem solving needs
- Programmes create opportunities for the civic community to learn, connect, engage and collaborate and seed co-created solutions
Civic media with insightful reports on critical urban issues, ideas and solutions for cities.
India’s leading civic-tech & urban data commons and community, enabling data based solutioning
Courses, workshops and other programmes to help citizens learn, engage and act
The origin story
In 2008, Subramaniam Vincent and Meera K founded Citizen Matters as a local news magazine for Bengaluru under a small media startup called Oorvani Media. By 2013, this had evolved into a civic media platform under the non profit Oorvani Foundation. Citizen Matters has since expanded with local chapters in Chennai and Mumbai.
In 2016, Open City was started as a small side project to host public datasets. This has now become one of India’s leading urban data platform supporting a vibrant data community.
By 2020, we expanded into new programmes to bring capacity building and training to citizens and strengthened our community engagement initiatives.
Our work is now structured as a complementary set of knowledge platforms and on-ground civic engagement and capacity-building programmes.
Oorvani Foundation is funded by foundation grants, philanthropists, and individual donors.