Announcements

WHY, WHO, WHAT, WHERE …….. SARVODAYA?

Sarvodaya, Sri Lanka’s biggest charity, is dedicated to making a positive difference to the lives of rural Sri Lankans. Our grassroots movement now reaches 15,000 villages in 34 districts with 1,500 staff throughout Sri Lanka.

Founded by a Sri Lankan schoolteacher in 1958, our philosophy is based on Buddhist-Gandhian philosophy and we work across all ethnic and religious communities. We are dedicated to the sustainable empowerment of people through self-help and collective support, to non-violence and peace.

It is not as much what we do to alleviate rural poverty but the way in which we do it which makes us so effective and sustainable – through the active participation and engagement of the villagers themselves.

Our social and technological village development programmes continue unabated; in addition, in response to urgent needs in our country, we are continuing with our award-winning Tsunami recovery programme and conflict resolution activities towards building a lasting peace.

“Are We Meeting Our Responsibility to Children?” I welcome the decision of the InterAction Council to hold this meeting specifically on the Theme, ‘Our Responsibility to Children.’ It is my belief that the current meeting in Tokyo as well as the meeting to be held in Salzburg next July will give a strong message and […]

Social Empowerment Division Sarvodaya Social Empowerment division weaves an integrated approach to personal, family, village and regional development that extents far beyond mere economics. It is an infrastructure through, which flows an energy that cannot be described in economic or bureaucratic terms alone. Not government. Nor merely technical assistance, professionalism and the accumulation of business […]

The Eastern vision of our political future is not a dictatorship of the intellectual, a bourgeois oligarchy, or a proletariat autocracy, jealous of its class privileges and superimposed upon passive and inarticulate millions, but of a peasant democracy rising layer after layer from the old and essential local and functional groupings, growing from district to […]

I am with you this evening at the request of Honourable Judge Weeramanthri who wanted me to make a short speech on the subject of Buddhism and Humanitarian Law. I confess that I am not a scholar in either Buddhism or International Humanitarian Law. In spite of that there was no way I could say […]

I wish to begin my remarks by thanking the Niwano Peace Foundation for convening this Niwano Peace Forum. The late President Nikkyo Niwano’s name has already gone into history as the pioneer and the foremost promoter of inter-religious co-operation for peace in the twentieth century. We are happy that his vision and mission are carried […]