Educational Innovation in Sri Lanka: Sarvodaya and Trans4m collaborate towards building a unique Learning-and-Innovation Platform for Societal Renewal in Sri Lanka
6 July 2018: Dr. Vinya Ariyaratne, General Secretary of Sarvodaya, joins Trans4m at its Home for Humanity for two days of intense consultations and co-creation to envision and design a new kind of learning-and-innovation institution for integrated societal development in Sri Lanka and beyond.
The two-day working session between Dr. Ariyaratne and Trans4m’s co-founder Alexander Schieffer purposefully built on the ten years of experience that Sarvodaya has accumulated through its Sarvodaya Institute for Higher Learning. With the 60thanniversary of the Sarvodaya movement approaching at the end of this year, and with the worrying backdrop of national and global imbalances, Sarvodaya is now ready to evolve its educational activities to a whole new level.
In short, Sarvodaya is determined to set up a “national learning and innovation platform” committed to the social, cultural-spiritual, political and economic renewal of the Sri Lankan Society – as an evolutionary catalyst for towards a Wellbeing-Society, and to turn Sri Lanka into a global role model for Integrated Community Development. Such a catalytic platform will be geared to innovate Sarvodaya from within (One Sarvodaya), as well as towards building national healing and unity (One Sri Lanka) and to contribute to a world of peace and unity-in-diversity (One World).
Dr. Ariyaratne, who is also member of Trans4m’s Global Wisdom Council, emphasized the urgent need for societal transformation in Sri Lanka – in a manner that renews and integrates politics, economics, culture and community in a new way. In his words: “Our Country and the World long for a new vision of holistic development, and we need to design the learning-and-innovation processes that can bring it about!”
During the workshop, four fields of awakening (political awakening, eco-economic awakening, spiritual-moral-cultural awakening, and social awakening) were identified, forming the base of transformative programs and processes to be developed in the forthcoming months and years.
Sarvodaya and Trans4m are working together in this distinctive endeavor because of their unique complementarity. While Sarvodaya, as host of the new learning-and-innovation platform, provides, aside from a longstanding track record in community development, an integrated approach to development, profound cultural rooting in local knowledge, and an extensive local network and infrastructure and an outstanding reputation, Trans4m itself offers a rich knowledge basis on Integral Development, unique Research-to-Innovation processes, a transformational approach to education, and a global network of role models for integrated development.
Watch this space!
