Human Resources Development Section

Mobilizing Youth for Community Development

The Work of Sarvodaya

Sarvodaya, an organization founded in 1958, applies the teaching of the Lord Buddha to community development. The name Sarvodaya is derived from two Sanskrit words meaning "universal" and "awakening", while Shramadana comes from the Sanskrit for "labour" and "sharing". The organizations full name is “Lanka Jatika Sarvodaya Shramadana Sangamaya, Sri Lanka”, but in every day live it is known as Sarvodaya.

The objective of the organization is to provide opportunities for volunteers to engage in community development. This provides opportunities for youth to understand the socio-economic problems of the country and to learn the means of solving those problems, in accordance with the Sarvodaya philosophy.

Sarvodaya is a large organization that is currently active in some 8,000 villages in the country. There are 2,478 registered Sarvodaya Shramadana Societies in Sri Lanka. The organization employs a large full-time paid staff and many volunteers at all levels, although the current financial crisis has resulted in a significant reduction in the number of paid staff. Youth members of the organization, the core group of the volunteers, are aged between 16 and 25 years.

Thousands of young people in the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement of Sri Lanka offer their labour as a gift in rural areas. They help underprivileged people to build drinking water supplies and irrigation systems for their rice fields, roads to villages, schools and community centres for young people, and health and sanitation facilities. The youth workers are provided with small allowances and bicycles by the programme, which trains them as facilitators in the local development process. The selection criteria for the workers ensures that they are of reputable character, have no affiliation with political party, have little or no family obligations, and possess a minimum secondary school education.

Sarvodaya seeks to attract people, especially youths, and engage them actively as committed workers striving for a better society. In each village in which it is active, Sarvodaya seeks to recruit youths, involve them as workers in society, and provide them with training to adequately equip them to serve their country. Youths who have gone through training in different skills of village reconstruction serve as full-time workers. They inspire, learn from, educate, organize and work with the local people on a programme of self-development carved out by the community itself.

Young people have launched practical programmes in more than 8,000 of a total 23,000 villages in Sri Lanka. The programmes support individuals, families and communities in realizing sustainable forms of development involving social, economic and political restructuring. Sarvodaya aims to network the village communities to make a national impact. Within this framework young people can participate in harmonizing the traditional and modern in an appropriate and practical manner, often over an extended period, until the village community becomes completely independent.

Taken from the publication: “Review of the Youth Situation, Policies and Programmes in Asia and the Pacific”, ESCAP, 1997