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Development Buddhist Style:

The Sarvodaya Movement of Sri Lanka

by Mike Levien

I left the United States in the Fall of 2003 with a few belongings, a one way ticket to Delhi, and a consuming preoccupation. After two years of community development work in the US and Central America—which allowed me to see dozens of successful cooperatives, community land trusts, organic farms, urban gardens, and other projects—I had developed a burning interest in “alternative” economics. My central question had become: given the endemic injustices, inequalities, and unsustainability of the hegemonic political-economic order, what are the alternative models evolving out of grassroots struggles in communities across the world? If, as the saying of the World Social Forum goes, “Another World is Possible,” what do the seeds of this other world look like? Outside of the manichean poles of neo-liberal capitalism and authoritarian communism, what kinds of social and economic organization can we turn to? Not seeking a single answer or utopian model (this is the problem with both neo-liberalism and state socialism), I set out in search of small, scattered, diverse experiments and forms of living that might collectively offer some compelling values and models for building “another world.”

As it happened, I spent most of my year abroad working with an anti-dam struggle in Western India—fighting against the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada River, one of the penultimate examples of destructive development. Although the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement) contained within its resistance a vision of an alternative order (and had even undertaken some exciting alternative development work), it had to necessarily focus much of its energy on saving the farms and communities of thousands of indigenous and peasant families. I felt compelled to take some short breaks from the struggle (or Sangarsh) to seek out more examples of what Gandhians call Nirman—constructive alternatives. This took me across India, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Sri Lanka, and included everything from organic farms, women’s associations, cooperative businesses, and community resource management projects to alternative schools, natural building projects, sustainable energy experiments, and socially engaged Buddhist ashrams. One of the most inspiring of these visits occurred in the Spring of 2004 when, needing to leave India to renew my visa, I decided to catch a flight to Sri Lanka where, in the shadow a bloody twenty-two year civil war, one of the world’s most dynamic social movements has been not-so-quietly evolving.

I had heard of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement as one of the most successful examples of alternative development and nonviolent social change out there. Inspired by Buddhist values and Gandhian thought, the Sarvodaya Movement, so I learned, had set out on a massive experiment to create a new society from the village up. My primary reason for going to Sri Lanka was to see this for myself. After leaving the Narmada Valley and visiting some interesting cooperatives in the Southern Indian state of Kerala, I hopped a train to Madras and then a plane to Colombo. Shortly after arriving in the capital, I had a propitious meeting at the Colombo YMCA hostel with Matthew Thompson, an Irish photographer on an around-the-world photojournalism project. Over a few St. Patrick’s day beers, Matt became interested in the idea and decided to accompany me and take some photos. Our brief glimpse of what the Sarvodaya movement has accomplished over the past 45 years convinced both of us that it was an important story of hope for this war-torn island—and for the world at large.

It began in 1958 in one of Sri Lanka’s poorest communities. Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne, a teacher at a prestigous Buddhist high school, and some of his students organized a small voluntary service society. From this modest social service effort emerged the realization that when people share their labor and spirit in a common undertaking, anything is possible. And from this insight was born a national movement for community development and social revitalization. Which then grew. By 1980, the Sarvodaya Sharamadan Movement had nearly 100,000 full-time volunteers. Today it is the largest peoples' movement in Sri Lanka, and the largest non-governmental institution in the country. It has created a vast network of village development and social service programs, covering practically everything from micro-credit, organic agriculture, health-care, sustainable technology, pre-schools, orphanages, and job training for the disabled, to reconstruction and conflict resolution in Sri Lanka's war-torn Northeast. (While my visit and the writing of this article preceded the devastating tsunami of December 26, 2004, Sarvodaya has since become very involved in relief and reconstruction in the affected areas). Their holistic approach to social transformation is matched by an ability to put it into effect on a large scale: at last count, Sarvodaya was active in 15,000 out of 25,000 villages in Sri Lanka.

Yet, as my discussions with Sarvodaya workers clearly conveyed, it’s not the numbers, programs, or tangible results that are the most important features of the movement. It’s the values embedded in the work, and the process of personal and collective awakening that are at the core of Sarvodaya. The underlying goals of the movement are contained in the name itself. The Sanskrit word Sarvodaya was translated by Mahatma Gandhi as "welfare of all," which he contrasted with the West’s utilitarian concept of "greatest good for the greatest number.” In Sri Lanka, Sarvodaya has been slightly recast in a Buddhist light to mean "awakening of all." Sharamadana means the giving (dana) of human energy (shrama). Sarvodaya Sharamadana can thus be translated as the "awakening of all through shared labor." This process of awakening, beginning at the individual, family, and village levels and spreading out in concentric circles to the nation and world, is at the heart of Sarvodaya’s vision of social change.

When Dr. Ariyaratne and his students started Sarvodaya, Sri Lanka was just emerging from the colonial yoke of the British. What values and policies it would follow in the post-colonial period of nation building—the Western capitalist ones of its former rulers, or an approach more grounded in its own culture and spiritual values—was at question. By the mid-fifties, it was already clear that the independent Sri Lankan government was pursuing a Western model of development just as its larger neighbor to the North was doing after thoroughly discarding the philosophical remnants of Gandhi.

Banking for Change

Leena Kahapalaarachi is not your typical banker.

Leena Kahapalaarachi.

As manager of her village's Sarvodaya Development Bank, Mrs. Leena seems to know every small entrepreneur in Deltara, this Western Sri Lankan community, along with their business plan, equipment costs, and, importantly, the names of their children. Her parasol raised against the harsh Sri Lankan sun, she leads us on foot around the village to meet a few of her many clients, who are also her neighbors. In the front room of a nearby house, the walls draped with dresses, blouses, and childrens' clothes, Mrs. Leelawathi along with her sister and daughter, are working at their sewing machines. Mrs. Leelawathi explains that eight years ago she took out a Rs. 100,000 loan (approximately $1,000) from the village bank to buy fabric and a sewing machine that has helped her family business to prosper. The steady humming of the machines, keeping pace with orders to be filled, is a testament to this success.

A small dress-making and tailoring business, started with a SEEDs loan.

A hundred yards from the Leelawathi's is the home and woodshop of Dayasiri Silva, his wife Vayalat, and son Thusitha. As Thusitha demonstrates how to use a lathe, his mother explains that a Rs. 125,000 loan from the village bank allowed them to buy machinery and timber to improve their furniture making business. Now they can produce more tables and chairs to sell in the cities.

Up the hill from the Silvas' and opposite the Buddhist temple is Sithumina printers, a husband and wife enterprise that prints wedding cards, posters, notices, and receipts. In an annex of their house, Hansapala Peries proudly shows us his offset printer, which he bought with a Rs. 100,00 loan from the village bank. The new machine, which is much faster than the old one, has brought them substantially more work.

All three families report improved business capacity and greater income as a result of the loan. They represent just a few of the 4,000 micro-loans that Leena Kahapalaarachi and the Sarvodaya Development Bank have made within the village since 1987. Where previously banking services were almost unavailable and the community was largely dependent on wage labor in nearby timber yards, the bank has helped a range of entrepreneurs like them to create or expand their own businesses, provided families with access to small household loans, and strengthened the economic independence and security of this once-poor village.

The consequences of this industrial macro-development strategy were already becoming clear to Ariyaratne, who observed, "By the side of gargantuan dams are parched fields that poor farmers watch disconsolately and with mounting discontent. Under the electricity wires which carry power from the dam to the cities and factories live people who have no permanent structures to call homes and hence are not eligible for that electricity."

And so while the government was initiating top-down mega-industrial projects, Ariyaratne and others decided to embark on a program of bottom-up development that sought to directly change conditions in the villages. This, over the years, evolved into Sarvodaya’s sophisticated grassroots approach to social change and development.

At the heart of this approach is the idea and practice of Sharamadan, the collective voluntary effort of people to tackle their common problems and meet their basic needs. Sharamadan is the first and key component of what has come to be called Sarvodaya's Five Stage Model of village development. The basic idea is that villagers come together to identify and discuss their needs and aspirations, and then collectively devise a strategy to achieve them. To begin, the movement facilitates a Shramadana Camp in the village, in which the villagers—men, women, children, and elders—set out to work on a community project, often a road, bridge, or school. A job is found for everyone and the process of the whole village working together unleashes community spirit. While a concrete community asset is built, the intangible result is building peoples’ collective inspiration to transform their lives and communities.

The energy and spirit of the Sharamadana Camp then fuels the organization of the community into farmers' groups, mothers' groups, childrens' groups, and elder groups. This social infrastructure becomes the base of future Sarvodaya activities and programs. Village leaders are trained in teaching, management, health education, and legal aid. The mothers' and childrens' groups usually start a Sarvodaya pre-school—the movement has started over 6,000 pre-schools in Sri Lanka, almost 5 out of every 6 in the country.

At stage three comes the founding of the village Sarvodaya Sharmadana Society, the local branch of the movement. The society becomes legally incorporated and assumes responsibility for undertaking projects to meet the basic needs of the village. Once this is accomplished, stage four is reached and economic development activities begin, including the establishment of savings and loan societies. Finally at Stage 5, villages are expected to be self-managed and financed, controlling their own development, and assisting neighboring villages.

While this Five-Stage process is a simplification of a more complicated reality, it is a useful framework that Sarvodaya uses for conceptualizing the development process. Sarvodaya staff and volunteers—organized into economic, social, and technological empowerment divisions—assist villages through this process, with a headquarters in the Western Coastal town of Moratuwa and regional offices throughout the country.

Sarvodaya’s Social Empowerment division organizes the Sharamadana camps and assists communities in building social infrastructure and services. Through community health units, it helps to create primary health activities and services, organizes public awareness campaigns and trains health workers to provide reproductive, mental, and nutritional health services. It has taken a special interest in providing mental health services for children affected by the violence of Sri Lanka’s civil war and has also helped provide relief and reconstruction activities in the Northeast, helping families displaced by the war to reestablish their lives and communities, both materially and psychologically.

On the technological side, Sarvodaya’s Technological Empowerment Division has worked with villages to meet their basic infrastructure requirements for water, sanitation, housing, and electricity, while employing appropriate and sustainable technology. Sarvodaya has promoted and in some cases designed a number of appropriate technologies, helping villages to build their own solar, biogas, and wind power, as well as hand pumps, gravity water schemes, latrines and wells. Recently, Sarvodaya has sought to spread the benefits of information technology to the rural poor by creating village Telecenters with internet access and other multi-media resources.

In 1986, recognizing the need to become more involved in the economic lives of villagers, the movement launched Sarvodaya Economic Enterprise Development Service (SEEDs). With the mission of eradicating poverty by promoting economic empowerment for sustainable livelihoods, SEEDS has provided management training, technical assistance, and financing—what it terms "credit plus"—to help create a vast network of over 3,000 lending societies with a total membership of over 580,000. SEEDs helps to train and equip these village-run financial institutions, which are then able to make small loans within their communities for agriculture, education, small business development, household needs, and solar energy. Through this decentralized community-based banking, villagers' savings are positively reinvested in their village instead of further enriching banks in the cities or exploitative moneylenders. And these savings—along with outside credit mobilized by SEEDS—help to build community assets, and greater economic independence. Collectively, the SEEDs network is the largest micro-credit institution in Sri Lanka, having made over two million micro-loans totaling approximately $70 million, most of it to women.

Ms. Peries, showing of the product of her and her
husband’s printing press, bought with a SEEDs loan.

In addition to these major program areas, Sarvodaya has so many special projects and sub-movements that, at the risk of sounding like a laundry list, I’ll mention only a few. Significant among them is the Sarvodaya Womens’ Movement, started in 1987 with the mission to, “Provide women the opportunity and direction so they can assume their rightful place in society and realize their aspirations, hopes, and strengths.” Practically, this has inspired a number of initiatives, including skills training for self-employment, shelters, rehabilitation and educational centers for street children and their mothers, transitional care for women released from prison, organic farming projects, gender sensitization training, income generating projects, and training for the elimination of violence against women.

Environmentally, the Sarvodaya Institute for Bio-Diversity Conservation has been promoting and distributing Effective Micro-Organisms as organic alternatives to chemical fertilizers and pesticides, promoting agro-forestry, plant nurseries, environmental cleanups by youth, recycling, and public awareness on a variety of environmental issues. I was lucky to bump into a volunteer specializing in organic farming and treated to a small lecture on the benefits of micro-organisms for organic pest control.

Sarvodaya also has a legal services movement that began when lawyers started volunteering their services to farmers in the area of Anuradhapura in 1979. This turned into a national movement that has provided free legal advice and advocacy to thousands of people who otherwise couldn’t afford it. It has also taken on public interest litigation, public seminars on human, children’s and women’s rights, as well as programs to prevent child abuse.

To insure that its activities reach disadvantaged people who are often left out by development projects, Sarvodaya launched Sarvodaya Suwasetha, a programme that provides humanitarian care for vulnerable and disabled members of society. These include neglected children, elders, and those with disabilities. Suwasetha has over 120 full-time workers who run homes for orphaned, abandoned, and malnourished children, as well as for teenagers and elders, pre-schools for children with special needs, vocational and residential services for people with disabilities, rehabilitation for youth in refugee and detention camps, and an internationally acclaimed school for the deaf. Visiting a Suwasetha center was perhaps the most moving part of our trip—in one room deaf and handicapped women learning to become tailors; in the next a group of women taking care of a large room of orphaned children. It was then that the significance of “welfare of all” really sunk in.

Sarvodaya has also been very actively engaged in the long-running conflict between the separatist Tamil Tigers and the government. It has organized island wide peace meditations in which hundreds of thousands have participated. It has publicly put out a “peace plan” for resolving the conflict, organized public peace dialogues, and created “youth peace camps.” It has founded the Vishva Niketan Global Peace Meditation center, whose purpose is to provide a neutral and tranquil setting for the promotion of inter-ethnic, inter-faith, inter-state, and inter-political understanding and conflict resolution. Through this center, Sarvodaya has also created a successful program of teaching meditation to prisoners. Attending a meditation session in the center gave us some small appreciation for this spirit and vision of peace animating Sarvodaya’s work.

A group of handicapped children in the organic garden of their Sarvodaya school.

I could go on in length describing all the sub-programs and initiatives that have evolved under the Sarvodaya banner over the last forty-five years. But, in a word, what Sarvodaya has created is an extremely holistic vision of social change and development, and an equally diverse range of programs to bring it about.

Yet, Sarvodaya is quite clear that it is not simply another NGO concerned with material changes, programs, and quantifiable results. While non-sectarian, the spiritual dimension of Sarvodaya, which we got a taste of in the meditation class, is the basis of all of its work. Their fundamental mission is no less than to help create a “national and global awakening conducive to peace, harmony, and spiritual growth.” It sounds quite lofty. But, what Sarvodaya has done is to effectively take these Buddhist values and apply them very practically to pressing social issues, becoming one of the most successful examples of “socially-engaged Buddhism.”

With the Buddhist framework, Sarvodaya sees greed, hatred, and delusion as the three systemic evils that must be overcome in society while the four principal Buddhist social values are sharing, virtuous speech, right livelihood, and equality. For the latter values to replace the former, Sarvodaya believes it is necessary to start at the individual and community level to affect personal changes in consciousness, empower communities, and create alternative forms of organization that reflect these principles. A centralized economic and political system, in their view, is incompatible with these values and thus Sarvodaya endeavors to construct decentralized community-based organizations in which people can take control of their own destiny and work cooperatively towards sustainable and life-enhancing development.

It thus may already be obvious that the term “development” is a somewhat misleading word for describing Sarvodaya’s activities, which can’t be understood in the narrow economistic sense in which the word is often construed. The application of Buddhist teachings to economics has, through Sarvodaya’s work, yielded an alternative vision and model of what development means. While Sarvodaya is concerned with freeing people from material want, it is not interested in GDP and other conventional macro-economic indices. At the heart of Sarvodaya is a set of principles that starkly contrasts with the assumptions underlying much of Western economic thought. This begins, fundamentally, with assumptions about human nature and purpose. Underlying capitalist economics is the assumption that we are all self-centered individuals seeking maximum personal utility (somehow quantified in “utils”) from the harsh world around us. The standard of living we’re all supposed to be in pursuit of is primarily defined in material terms, and thus “development” becomes equated with the aggregate consumption of more things.

In the Buddhist conception of Sarvodaya, however, the standard of living is defined in spiritual, not material terms. The goal of “development” lies not in creating more aggregate wealth regardless of its distribution and sustainability, but in evolving a "no poverty, no affluence" society based on sustainable lifestyles and the simplification of material desires. According to Ariyaratne, “This definition of development goes beyond those that confine themselves to measuring gross national product, growth rates, per capita income, and even the latest measure called the Physical Quality of Life Index…. It represents the process [necessary for] total happiness.”

Sarvodaya Suwasetha workers caring for an orphaned child.

And thus in Sarvodaya’s view, development requires freeing people from want, but it is not simply about material satisfaction. While people must have sufficient incomes, of equal importance is creating schools to provide education, clinics for health access, appropriate technology for meeting water, electricity, and sanitation needs, and generally creating healthy, equitable, and sustainable communities. Most importantly, it is spiritual fullfilment and the empowerment of people to control their own lives and destinies that is most fundamental to human happiness and well-being. As Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy has described it, “Development is waking up—waking up to our true wealth and true potential as persons and as a society.”

Although our stay was brief and not nearly enough to get an indepth appreciation for the movement, we left impressed and inspired. What was ultimately striking about Sarvodaya was its marriage of compelling values with a range of very concrete models for effectively translating those values into social organization. Sarvodaya has succeeded, more than anyplace I had seen, in proactively constructing an alternative social order—based on democratic, egalitarian, and nonviolent principles—from the ground up. And while the government’s embrace of top-down development and corporate globalization remains dominant, Sarvodaya’s persuasive principles and the sheer scale of its achievement make it impossible to dismiss. It’s greatest accomplishment may lie in its demonstration of our collective “people power”— or janshakti—to create the communities, economies, and societies we seek. While not offering a blue-print, Sarvodaya shows us how how through collective effort, we can organically and pluralistically create our own visions of “another world” and, in the process, transform ourselves. As Sarvodaya workers like to say, “We build the road and the road builds us.”

Mike Levien is a graduate student in Sociology at UC-Berkeley. He can be reached at mlevien@berkeley.edu

Matthew Thompson is a freelance photographer from Ireland.

Table of Contents | The Good Life Center | Contact The Best We're Doing

The Best We're Doing : A Journal of The Good Life Center
Vol. 1 No.1 October 2005
Table of Contents GLC Home Don't miss Banking For Changebelow.	Development Buddhist Style: The Sarvodaya Movement of Sri Lanka by Mike Levien I left the United States in the Fall of 2003 with a few belongings, a one way ticket to Delhi, and a consuming preoccupation. After two years of community development work in the US and Central America—which allowed me to see dozens of successful cooperatives, community land trusts, organic farms, urban gardens, and other projects—I had developed a burning interest in “alternative” economics. My central question had become: given the endemic injustices, inequalities, and unsustainability of the hegemonic political-economic order, what are the alternative models evolving out of grassroots struggles in communities across the world? If, as the saying of the World Social Forum goes, “Another World is Possible,” what do the seeds of this other world look like? Outside of the manichean poles of neo-liberal capitalism and authoritarian communism, what kinds of social and economic organization can we turn to? Not seeking a single answer or utopian model (this is the problem with both neo-liberalism and state socialism), I set out in search of small, scattered, diverse experiments and forms of living that might collectively offer some compelling values and models for building “another world.” As it happened, I spent most of my year abroad working with an anti-dam struggle in Western India—fighting against the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada River, one of the penultimate examples of destructive development. Although the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement) contained within its resistance a vision of an alternative order (and had even undertaken some exciting alternative development work), it had to necessarily focus much of its energy on saving the farms and communities of thousands of indigenous and peasant families. I felt compelled to take some short breaks from the struggle (or Sangarsh) to seek out more examples of what Gandhians call Nirman—constructive alternatives. This took me across India, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Sri Lanka, and included everything from organic farms, women’s associations, cooperative businesses, and community resource management projects to alternative schools, natural building projects, sustainable energy experiments, and socially engaged Buddhist ashrams. One of the most inspiring of these visits occurred in the Spring of 2004 when, needing to leave India to renew my visa, I decided to catch a flight to Sri Lanka where, in the shadow a bloody twenty-two year civil war, one of the world’s most dynamic social movements has been not-so-quietly evolving. I had heard of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement as one of the most successful examples of alternative development and nonviolent social change out there. Inspired by Buddhist values and Gandhian thought, the Sarvodaya Movement, so I learned, had set out on a massive experiment to create a new society from the village up. My primary reason for going to Sri Lanka was to see this for myself. After leaving the Narmada Valley and visiting some interesting cooperatives in the Southern Indian state of Kerala, I hopped a train to Madras and then a plane to Colombo. Shortly after arriving in the capital, I had a propitious meeting at the Colombo YMCA hostel with Matthew Thompson, an Irish photographer on an around-the-world photojournalism project. Over a few St. Patrick’s day beers, Matt became interested in the idea and decided to accompany me and take some photos. Our brief glimpse of what the Sarvodaya movement has accomplished over the past 45 years convinced both of us that it was an important story of hope for this war-torn island—and for the world at large. It began in 1958 in one of Sri Lanka’s poorest communities. Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne, a teacher at a prestigous Buddhist high school, and some of his students organized a small voluntary service society. From this modest social service effort emerged the realization that when people share their labor and spirit in a common undertaking, anything is possible. And from this insight was born a national movement for community development and social revitalization. Which then grew. By 1980, the Sarvodaya Sharamadan Movement had nearly 100,000 full-time volunteers. Today it is the largest peoples' movement in Sri Lanka, and the largest non-governmental institution in the country. It has created a vast network of village development and social service programs, covering practically everything from micro-credit, organic agriculture, health-care, sustainable technology, pre-schools, orphanages, and job training for the disabled, to reconstruction and conflict resolution in Sri Lanka's war-torn Northeast. (While my visit and the writing of this article preceded the devastating tsunami of December 26, 2004, Sarvodaya has since become very involved in relief and reconstruction in the affected areas). Their holistic approach to social transformation is matched by an ability to put it into effect on a large scale: at last count, Sarvodaya was active in 15,000 out of 25,000 villages in Sri Lanka. Yet, as my discussions with Sarvodaya workers clearly conveyed, it’s not the numbers, programs, or tangible results that are the most important features of the movement. It’s the values embedded in the work, and the process of personal and collective awakening that are at the core of Sarvodaya. The underlying goals of the movement are contained in the name itself. The Sanskrit word Sarvodaya was translated by Mahatma Gandhi as "welfare of all," which he contrasted with the West’s utilitarian concept of "greatest good for the greatest number.” In Sri Lanka, Sarvodaya has been slightly recast in a Buddhist light to mean "awakening of all." Sharamadana means the giving (dana) of human energy (shrama). Sarvodaya Sharamadana can thus be translated as the "awakening of all through shared labor." This process of awakening, beginning at the individual, family, and village levels and spreading out in concentric circles to the nation and world, is at the heart of Sarvodaya’s vision of social change. When Dr. Ariyaratne and his students started Sarvodaya, Sri Lanka was just emerging from the colonial yoke of the British. What values and policies it would follow in the post-colonial period of nation building—the Western capitalist ones of its former rulers, or an approach more grounded in its own culture and spiritual values—was at question. By the mid-fifties, it was already clear that the independent Sri Lankan government was pursuing a Western model of development just as its larger neighbor to the North was doing after thoroughly discarding the philosophical remnants of Gandhi. Banking for Change Leena Kahapalaarachi is not your typical banker. Leena Kahapalaarachi. As manager of her village's Sarvodaya Development Bank, Mrs. Leena seems to know every small entrepreneur in Deltara, this Western Sri Lankan community, along with their business plan, equipment costs, and, importantly, the names of their children. Her parasol raised against the harsh Sri Lankan sun, she leads us on foot around the village to meet a few of her many clients, who are also her neighbors. In the front room of a nearby house, the walls draped with dresses, blouses, and childrens' clothes, Mrs. Leelawathi along with her sister and daughter, are working at their sewing machines. Mrs. Leelawathi explains that eight years ago she took out a Rs. 100,000 loan (approximately $1,000) from the village bank to buy fabric and a sewing machine that has helped her family business to prosper. The steady humming of the machines, keeping pace with orders to be filled, is a testament to this success. A small dress-making and tailoring business, started with a SEEDs loan. A hundred yards from the Leelawathi's is the home and woodshop of Dayasiri Silva, his wife Vayalat, and son Thusitha. As Thusitha demonstrates how to use a lathe, his mother explains that a Rs. 125,000 loan from the village bank allowed them to buy machinery and timber to improve their furniture making business. Now they can produce more tables and chairs to sell in the cities. Up the hill from the Silvas' and opposite the Buddhist temple is Sithumina printers, a husband and wife enterprise that prints wedding cards, posters, notices, and receipts. In an annex of their house, Hansapala Peries proudly shows us his offset printer, which he bought with a Rs. 100,00 loan from the village bank. The new machine, which is much faster than the old one, has brought them substantially more work. All three families report improved business capacity and greater income as a result of the loan. They represent just a few of the 4,000 micro-loans that Leena Kahapalaarachi and the Sarvodaya Development Bank have made within the village since 1987. Where previously banking services were almost unavailable and the community was largely dependent on wage labor in nearby timber yards, the bank has helped a range of entrepreneurs like them to create or expand their own businesses, provided families with access to small household loans, and strengthened the economic independence and security of this once-poor village. The consequences of this industrial macro-development strategy were already becoming clear to Ariyaratne, who observed, "By the side of gargantuan dams are parched fields that poor farmers watch disconsolately and with mounting discontent. Under the electricity wires which carry power from the dam to the cities and factories live people who have no permanent structures to call homes and hence are not eligible for that electricity." And so while the government was initiating top-down mega-industrial projects, Ariyaratne and others decided to embark on a program of bottom-up development that sought to directly change conditions in the villages. This, over the years, evolved into Sarvodaya’s sophisticated grassroots approach to social change and development. At the heart of this approach is the idea and practice of Sharamadan, the collective voluntary effort of people to tackle their common problems and meet their basic needs. Sharamadan is the first and key component of what has come to be called Sarvodaya's Five Stage Model of village development. The basic idea is that villagers come together to identify and discuss their needs and aspirations, and then collectively devise a strategy to achieve them. To begin, the movement facilitates a Shramadana Camp in the village, in which the villagers—men, women, children, and elders—set out to work on a community project, often a road, bridge, or school. A job is found for everyone and the process of the whole village working together unleashes community spirit. While a concrete community asset is built, the intangible result is building peoples’ collective inspiration to transform their lives and communities. The energy and spirit of the Sharamadana Camp then fuels the organization of the community into farmers' groups, mothers' groups, childrens' groups, and elder groups. This social infrastructure becomes the base of future Sarvodaya activities and programs. Village leaders are trained in teaching, management, health education, and legal aid. The mothers' and childrens' groups usually start a Sarvodaya pre-school—the movement has started over 6,000 pre-schools in Sri Lanka, almost 5 out of every 6 in the country. At stage three comes the founding of the village Sarvodaya Sharmadana Society, the local branch of the movement. The society becomes legally incorporated and assumes responsibility for undertaking projects to meet the basic needs of the village. Once this is accomplished, stage four is reached and economic development activities begin, including the establishment of savings and loan societies. Finally at Stage 5, villages are expected to be self-managed and financed, controlling their own development, and assisting neighboring villages. While this Five-Stage process is a simplification of a more complicated reality, it is a useful framework that Sarvodaya uses for conceptualizing the development process. Sarvodaya staff and volunteers—organized into economic, social, and technological empowerment divisions—assist villages through this process, with a headquarters in the Western Coastal town of Moratuwa and regional offices throughout the country. Sarvodaya’s Social Empowerment division organizes the Sharamadana camps and assists communities in building social infrastructure and services. Through community health units, it helps to create primary health activities and services, organizes public awareness campaigns and trains health workers to provide reproductive, mental, and nutritional health services. It has taken a special interest in providing mental health services for children affected by the violence of Sri Lanka’s civil war and has also helped provide relief and reconstruction activities in the Northeast, helping families displaced by the war to reestablish their lives and communities, both materially and psychologically. On the technological side, Sarvodaya’s Technological Empowerment Division has worked with villages to meet their basic infrastructure requirements for water, sanitation, housing, and electricity, while employing appropriate and sustainable technology. Sarvodaya has promoted and in some cases designed a number of appropriate technologies, helping villages to build their own solar, biogas, and wind power, as well as hand pumps, gravity water schemes, latrines and wells. Recently, Sarvodaya has sought to spread the benefits of information technology to the rural poor by creating village Telecenters with internet access and other multi-media resources. In 1986, recognizing the need to become more involved in the economic lives of villagers, the movement launched Sarvodaya Economic Enterprise Development Service (SEEDs). With the mission of eradicating poverty by promoting economic empowerment for sustainable livelihoods, SEEDS has provided management training, technical assistance, and financing—what it terms "credit plus"—to help create a vast network of over 3,000 lending societies with a total membership of over 580,000. SEEDs helps to train and equip these village-run financial institutions, which are then able to make small loans within their communities for agriculture, education, small business development, household needs, and solar energy. Through this decentralized community-based banking, villagers' savings are positively reinvested in their village instead of further enriching banks in the cities or exploitative moneylenders. And these savings—along with outside credit mobilized by SEEDS—help to build community assets, and greater economic independence. Collectively, the SEEDs network is the largest micro-credit institution in Sri Lanka, having made over two million micro-loans totaling approximately $70 million, most of it to women. Ms. Peries, showing of the product of her and her husband’s printing press, bought with a SEEDs loan. In addition to these major program areas, Sarvodaya has so many special projects and sub-movements that, at the risk of sounding like a laundry list, I’ll mention only a few. Significant among them is the Sarvodaya Womens’ Movement, started in 1987 with the mission to, “Provide women the opportunity and direction so they can assume their rightful place in society and realize their aspirations, hopes, and strengths.” Practically, this has inspired a number of initiatives, including skills training for self-employment, shelters, rehabilitation and educational centers for street children and their mothers, transitional care for women released from prison, organic farming projects, gender sensitization training, income generating projects, and training for the elimination of violence against women. Environmentally, the Sarvodaya Institute for Bio-Diversity Conservation has been promoting and distributing Effective Micro-Organisms as organic alternatives to chemical fertilizers and pesticides, promoting agro-forestry, plant nurseries, environmental cleanups by youth, recycling, and public awareness on a variety of environmental issues. I was lucky to bump into a volunteer specializing in organic farming and treated to a small lecture on the benefits of micro-organisms for organic pest control. Sarvodaya also has a legal services movement that began when lawyers started volunteering their services to farmers in the area of Anuradhapura in 1979. This turned into a national movement that has provided free legal advice and advocacy to thousands of people who otherwise couldn’t afford it. It has also taken on public interest litigation, public seminars on human, children’s and women’s rights, as well as programs to prevent child abuse. To insure that its activities reach disadvantaged people who are often left out by development projects, Sarvodaya launched Sarvodaya Suwasetha, a programme that provides humanitarian care for vulnerable and disabled members of society. These include neglected children, elders, and those with disabilities. Suwasetha has over 120 full-time workers who run homes for orphaned, abandoned, and malnourished children, as well as for teenagers and elders, pre-schools for children with special needs, vocational and residential services for people with disabilities, rehabilitation for youth in refugee and detention camps, and an internationally acclaimed school for the deaf. Visiting a Suwasetha center was perhaps the most moving part of our trip—in one room deaf and handicapped women learning to become tailors; in the next a group of women taking care of a large room of orphaned children. It was then that the significance of “welfare of all” really sunk in. Sarvodaya has also been very actively engaged in the long-running conflict between the separatist Tamil Tigers and the government. It has organized island wide peace meditations in which hundreds of thousands have participated. It has publicly put out a “peace plan” for resolving the conflict, organized public peace dialogues, and created “youth peace camps.” It has founded the Vishva Niketan Global Peace Meditation center, whose purpose is to provide a neutral and tranquil setting for the promotion of inter-ethnic, inter-faith, inter-state, and inter-political understanding and conflict resolution. Through this center, Sarvodaya has also created a successful program of teaching meditation to prisoners. Attending a meditation session in the center gave us some small appreciation for this spirit and vision of peace animating Sarvodaya’s work. A group of handicapped children in the organic garden of their Sarvodaya school. I could go on in length describing all the sub-programs and initiatives that have evolved under the Sarvodaya banner over the last forty-five years. But, in a word, what Sarvodaya has created is an extremely holistic vision of social change and development, and an equally diverse range of programs to bring it about. Yet, Sarvodaya is quite clear that it is not simply another NGO concerned with material changes, programs, and quantifiable results. While non-sectarian, the spiritual dimension of Sarvodaya, which we got a taste of in the meditation class, is the basis of all of its work. Their fundamental mission is no less than to help create a “national and global awakening conducive to peace, harmony, and spiritual growth.” It sounds quite lofty. But, what Sarvodaya has done is to effectively take these Buddhist values and apply them very practically to pressing social issues, becoming one of the most successful examples of “socially-engaged Buddhism.” With the Buddhist framework, Sarvodaya sees greed, hatred, and delusion as the three systemic evils that must be overcome in society while the four principal Buddhist social values are sharing, virtuous speech, right livelihood, and equality. For the latter values to replace the former, Sarvodaya believes it is necessary to start at the individual and community level to affect personal changes in consciousness, empower communities, and create alternative forms of organization that reflect these principles. A centralized economic and political system, in their view, is incompatible with these values and thus Sarvodaya endeavors to construct decentralized community-based organizations in which people can take control of their own destiny and work cooperatively towards sustainable and life-enhancing development. It thus may already be obvious that the term “development” is a somewhat misleading word for describing Sarvodaya’s activities, which can’t be understood in the narrow economistic sense in which the word is often construed. The application of Buddhist teachings to economics has, through Sarvodaya’s work, yielded an alternative vision and model of what development means. While Sarvodaya is concerned with freeing people from material want, it is not interested in GDP and other conventional macro-economic indices. At the heart of Sarvodaya is a set of principles that starkly contrasts with the assumptions underlying much of Western economic thought. This begins, fundamentally, with assumptions about human nature and purpose. Underlying capitalist economics is the assumption that we are all self-centered individuals seeking maximum personal utility (somehow quantified in “utils”) from the harsh world around us. The standard of living we’re all supposed to be in pursuit of is primarily defined in material terms, and thus “development” becomes equated with the aggregate consumption of more things. In the Buddhist conception of Sarvodaya, however, the standard of living is defined in spiritual, not material terms. The goal of “development” lies not in creating more aggregate wealth regardless of its distribution and sustainability, but in evolving a "no poverty, no affluence" society based on sustainable lifestyles and the simplification of material desires. According to Ariyaratne, “This definition of development goes beyond those that confine themselves to measuring gross national product, growth rates, per capita income, and even the latest measure called the Physical Quality of Life Index…. It represents the process [necessary for] total happiness.” Sarvodaya Suwasetha workers caring for an orphaned child. And thus in Sarvodaya’s view, development requires freeing people from want, but it is not simply about material satisfaction. While people must have sufficient incomes, of equal importance is creating schools to provide education, clinics for health access, appropriate technology for meeting water, electricity, and sanitation needs, and generally creating healthy, equitable, and sustainable communities. Most importantly, it is spiritual fullfilment and the empowerment of people to control their own lives and destinies that is most fundamental to human happiness and well-being. As Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy has described it, “Development is waking up—waking up to our true wealth and true potential as persons and as a society.” Although our stay was brief and not nearly enough to get an indepth appreciation for the movement, we left impressed and inspired. What was ultimately striking about Sarvodaya was its marriage of compelling values with a range of very concrete models for effectively translating those values into social organization. Sarvodaya has succeeded, more than anyplace I had seen, in proactively constructing an alternative social order—based on democratic, egalitarian, and nonviolent principles—from the ground up. And while the government’s embrace of top-down development and corporate globalization remains dominant, Sarvodaya’s persuasive principles and the sheer scale of its achievement make it impossible to dismiss. It’s greatest accomplishment may lie in its demonstration of our collective “people power”— or janshakti—to create the communities, economies, and societies we seek. While not offering a blue-print, Sarvodaya shows us how how through collective effort, we can organically and pluralistically create our own visions of “another world” and, in the process, transform ourselves. As Sarvodaya workers like to say, “We build the road and the road builds us.” Mike Levien is a graduate student in Sociology at UC-Berkeley. He can be reached at mlevien@berkeley.edu Matthew Thompson is a freelance photographer from Ireland. Table of Contents \| The Good Life Center \| Contact The Best We're Doing All material copyright The Good Life Center.