Achyutha Sharma, Collaborative community : Creative Arts & Design for Social Impact

Collaborative community is a creative consultancy lead by a core team: Achyutha Sharma, Anirudh Goel, Pulkit Srivastava, and Madhavi Sahu. It is an initiative launched under Sulochana Development Trust that supports Creative Arts & Design for Social Impact. Achyutha Sharma, Cofounder CC talks to YourStory about CC and its vision.About Collaborative Community:

Collaborative Community is an initiative under the ‘Sulochana Development Trust’ that supports Creative Arts & Design for Social Impact in India. We offer creative and strategic solutions to non-profit and for-profit organizations that work in the social sector, in India.

We offer services like Branding, creative strategy, Design (communication, web, space, retail, craft), marketing, design workshops and creative training programs. We believe that the creative industry can extend its expertise in creative solutions to solve, accelerate and innovate social impact for organizations in the social sector that often have limited access to new strategies or design innovations. We intend to fill the gap by utilizing our creative skills across projects and our broader vision is to promote the concept of ‘Creative economy’ across organizations

Differentiators and Business Model:

Our differentiator is that we offer a wide array of services under a single platform like multi disciplinary design, strategy, branding, design workshops and marketing for nominal fees. Our consultants are industry experts who offer the latest trends and best practices. Most importantly, this service is within the broader framework of development based on the concept of ‘creative economy’ which is defined by social relevance, economic sustainability, ecological balance, and socio-cultural contextualization.

Unlike a design firm or an agency, our creative solutions are within a development context that is exactly aligned with the impact that the social sector intends to make in India. These services are not readily available and thus a big business opportunity exists in the social sector.

Vision for the near future:

For the coming two years, we would focus on our growth in terms of projects, documenting and quantifying the creative impact in our projects. As a result, Collaborative Community would like to demystify the myth that design solutions cannot have innovative and tangible impact in the development sector. We would also like to partner with and align more organizations towards the broader vision of the ‘creative economy’. The focus is on working on diverse projects, engage with more communities and organizations and document our tangible impact.

Organizational Structure:

Interestingly, we have an organic team structure which can be scalable as Collaborative Community grows; first, we have core team members that drive the organization who are the stakeholders of the organization and coordinate all projects. Secondly, collaborator – these consultants from varied backgrounds and skills who offer their expertise on our projects as part time consultancy. This allows us to involve industry based professionals without going through an early stage recruitment which involves high investment of the team.

The motivation for these collaborators from the industry is the unique opportunity to make a tangible creative impact in the social sector. It also makes them one of the contributors to the larger vision of ‘creative economy’. We also have the board of advisors from Sulochana Development Trust who are established professionals from specific industries who offer mentorship and feedback to our projects. As Collaborative Community grows each year, the core team members will nominate one or two collaborators to be part of the core team which gives deserving collaborators an opportunity to transition into stakeholders. This idea is also aligned to the spirit of a ‘democratic’ process of team growth. We also have an international talent partner in Sandbox which is a global community of young innovators and entrepreneurs who are dynamic leaders in their respective industry and region.

They would actively contribute to our projects hwere an international expertise is required. And at the national level, we have partnered with YourStory, that connects us with other organizations and communities in our domain.

For more details about what we do, visit us at http://www.wix.com/collaborativec/cc or mail us at [email protected]