From tragedy to blessing: Kushil’s journey

Uinspire founder Kieran Arasaratnam interviews Kushil Gunasekera, a pioneer in community development and impact investment in Sri Lanka, on overcoming adversity and the beauty of reconciliation

Meeting Kushil for the first time, he does not come across as a man who has seen hardship. His broad smile, friendly manner and openness gives the sense of man who is at ease – a man who is content with life. However, the reality is quite different.

Kushil Gunasekera, the founder of Sri Lanka’s Foundation of Goodness, is not content, at least not with the suffering of others. His life’s work has been to help those less fortunate. This work has led him to meet people in the most desperate and impoverished circumstances on a daily basis. This experience might make cynics out of lesser men, but not Kushil. 

His enthusiasm has not dulled since his work with the Foundation began in 1999, when in his home village of Seenigama he decided to commit his time and resources to provide essential services – education, sanitation and healthcare – to the people who needed it most. His so-called holistic approach to charity and development, though smaller in scale back then, was very effective. With early help from people like cricketing legends Kumar Sangakkara and Muttiah Muralitharan, he was quickly changing lives for the better. 

But the real birth of the Foundation as we know it today arguably came on Boxing Day 2004, when a tsunami crashed through his community, claiming thousands of lives and destroying five years of Foundation work in the making. He recalls: “It was unimaginable. An unprecedented disaster. I had never heard of a tsunami then, I was unable to imagine that the sea waters could invade the land so furiously the way they did.”

Waves of compassion

The waves of terror that brought so much death that day was only matched by what followed – the waves of compassion that came from local and international communities to help Kushil and his people. He described how his ancestral home, also a wreck from the disaster, quickly became a centre for relief operations. This home would later be gifted by Kushil to the community and with the sponsorship of the Marylebone Cricket Club, turn it into the MCC Centre of Excellence – the hub of the Foundation’s work today.

“We rebuilt our work, little by little. One step at a time,” he says. “It is hard to say it was a blessing, because the tsunami was such a tragedy, but this event led us to achieve many of our aspirations for the Foundation. We were able to turn our sorrow into a blessing. We could not have developed 30 empowered sectors – ranging across training and scholarships to children’s homes to elderly care – were it not for the help that came to our doorstep.”

The Foundation had refused to turn down any opportunity that presented itself. A particular case Kushil recalls was the Foundation’s dentistry clinics; the UK insurance company Aviva had offered funding for a clinic, and though Kushil had no knowledge of the sector – or where the funding to sustain the centre would come from – he would not pass up the opportunity. 

“I had no idea of dentistry but I knew this was the last time someone would come to my doorstep and offer these facilities, so I said yes I can take it, and I’ll do it.”

Now 13 years on, the Foundation serves over 20,000 patients in over 50 villages, in addition to its numerous other services. But Kushil takes nothing for granted; his Buddhist philosophy has not only formed the moral bedrock of the Foundation of Goodness but has shaped his perspective on the 2004 tsunami. 

“I understand the nature of impermanence and that nothing is going to last forever. So, I am always ready when things take a turn for the worse, I am ready to stay calm and do the best I can,” he says. “I live in the moment, what is gone is gone, you can’t reverse it. Change is inevitable and you have got to embrace change and not let go of your values”.

Building bridges

More recently, Kushil has turned his attention to communities hit by Sri Lanka’s man-made disasters, namely the civil war that ended in 2009. 

“Following the war, there was an outpouring of emotion, so many people rushing to help them out, but I realised that after a year there were still people that needed to be reached. We began our journey and every month we travelled to the north to provide essential school supplies and set up scholarships, libraries, computer training centres and other facilities.”

Again, Kushil called upon the support of cricketers Sangakkara and Murali to help with relief efforts in the north. This campaign has been a particularly poignant journey for Murali, who himself is Tamil, and wanted to work with the Foundation of Goodness to develop the Murali Cup.

Set up in 2011, the reconciliation tournament aims to develop school cricket in Sri Lanka’s rural areas, with a focus on the war-affected north and east, as well as promoting cross-cultural friendship. The event brings together 24 crickets teams – including eight women’s teams – from all corners of the country to play one week of cricket. This alone is an immense achievement in a nation that was at war with itself less than a decade ago. Getting there was not easy. 

“There has been a lot of distrust between the two communities,” says Kushil. “It took about a year before they could look at us, smile and accept our help. But regardless, we kept driving on and now it has become easier to work with them as they know we have no ulterior motives other than to help.”

The progress has been dramatic. The Foundation has now made over 75 individual visits to the north – with most taking place at monthly intervals. Kushil now has an empowerment centre in the north and will have three centres up and running by August. Kushil estimates there have been around 1,000 beneficiaries of these efforts to date. 

This drive for improvement and Sinhalese-Tamil reconciliation is in many ways embodied by the friendship of Kushil and Murali. A relationship that reached a touching milestone this June when both came to London to celebrate Murali’s induction into the ICC Hall of Fame – the first Sri Lankan to receive such an honour. 

These are still early days for Kushil, whose eyes still sparkle with the hope of things to come. Whatever he does next, his work has already inspired a new generation of changemakers – including our own organisation, Uinspire, which hopes to build upon this incredible work through our own platform, both in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. Kushil’s legacy is already secure but when asked how he would like to be remembered, his answer is of characteristic humility: 

“I don’t do this to be remembered. For me it was always about offering help to others unasked – that is my legacy,” he says. “Life is about doing small things with great love. The beauty of life depends on how happy others are because of us.”