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Co-founder and managing director, Priyanka Jain, talks about how their social enterprise 3x3 is helping civic organizations collaborate with their stakeholders and glean insights from applied research to design and pilot innovative programs, services, and initiatives that unlock social value.
"In the current state of affairs, our democratic values are being threatened. It is an ethical responsibility of urban practitioners to ensure that the voices of the people they serve are represented into critical decisions for public programs, services and projects," says Priyanka. Frustrated by a lack of empathetic approaches in the civic space, and after witnessing projects and programs fall short of achieving their intended impact, Priyanka Jain and Megan Marini co-founded a practice (3x3) in 2013, a social innovation and design research consultancy based in New York and New Delhi. The decision was driven by the desire to develop platforms that can democratize development decisions and help civic agencies balance multitude of different, often adversarial, interest groups and broker difficult conversations between these groups.
Priyanka have since led the studio on projects funded by national and global agencies such as Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board, Agence Francaise de Development, Selavip Foundation, and International Development Research Centre, on subjects as varied as decentralized sanitation systems, female entrepreneurship, and small business resiliency to riverfront developments, at city and neighbourhood-levels. Specifically, in urban sanitation, Priyanka worked with Greha and Archive Global on a project funded by Selavip to install 50 toilets in Aya Nagar, an informal settlement in south west Delhi. She is currently working with an Indo-French alliance on the environmental and social impact study of River Nag Development in Nagpur. Priyanka's work extends beyond Indian border. Along with her American partner, Megan Marini, she is also working in Haiti with LACNIC and IDRC in the role of research and evaluation partner for Ayitic Goes Global (AGG) program. A G20 flagship project, the AGG program is aimed to provide enabling environment for young women to participate in digital economy.
"We have learned that when leveraged correctly, creative methods help organizations innovate solutions through constructive dialogue, understanding the people they represent in the context of their everyday lives, and aligning public realm initiatives with real human wants, needs, and aspirations," says Priyanka. She adds that the results are not only more equitable and mutually beneficial, but also objectively better. With over 40 projects in 5 countries, 3x3 is already bringing the citizen back into the conversation and shifting the paradigm by embedding new human- and community-centered approaches for civic initiatives at both city and neighbourhood-levels in urban cities. Recently, 3x3's work was selected by the Municipal Art Society in New York to exhibit at their innovation conference on the occasion of their 125th anniversary.
Priyanka received her urban planning degree from Columbia University in New York and worked briefly for New York City Department of City Planning and Technological Change Lab at Columbia University before starting her journey as an entrepreneur. She was honored by DesignxDesign as an emerging designer under the age of 35 and won an award for her entry to Reinventing Dharavi competition. The competition entry made a case for the Dharavi Festival - an imaginative and innovative approach to redevelop our cities with its inhabitants as its principal actors. The entry is now published by Urban Design Research Institute in the 'Reinventing Dharavi: An ideas compendium' book and available for purchase on their website (http://www.udri.org). She has written on innovative and scalable working solutions for Delhi's urban poverty for URB.im, a Dallant Networks and Ford Foundation project, and spoken at various international conferences including Kyoorius Design yatra and Reinventing Dharavi conference.
About 3x3:
3x3, based in New York and New Delhi, is a social impact consultancy for civic initiatives that works to promote integrated design and development processes. Our research-driven and community-centered approach helps public sector organizations connect with their audiences to build successful and scalable programs, services, and strategies. We use collaborative engagement with applied research to deliver context-based insights for resource-efficient programs that create equitable economic and community development outcomes.
For more information, visit: http://3x3.co/.
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