Lanka’s two Diana Award winners spurred on to do more for peace
Two Sri Lankans were honoured with The Diana Award 2021 for their community service and volunteer efforts. On June 28, as the 2021 Virtual Diana Award Ceremony premiered on YouTube, Anojitha Sivaskaran and Janith Prabashwara Perera were in high company, with Britain’s Prince Harry, judges and board members of the Diana Award and other award recipients.
Established in memory of Princess Diana in 1999, the Diana Award continues her legacy by recognising young people who have worked to build peace and create harmony in their local communities.
Anojitha Sivaskaran, 25, was born in Mullaitivu. Her family was displaced many times while the civil war was raging in the North and East and she attended as many as 11 schools as a result and even lived in a displacement camp at one point, with her family.
Anojitha was able to complete her secondary education after her family moved to Jaffna, attending Victoria College at Chulipuram. In spite of the years spent at different schools until she was in grade nine, she received a district rank for her A/L exam results.
She then completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in Peace and Conflict Resolution at the University of Kelaniya, and this took her forward in her career and volunteer work.
Anojitha’s main goal is to serve the country through community service initiatives, and being directly affected by the civil war has steeled her resolve to make sure such an ethnic conflict never happens again.
“Winning the Diana Award has given me more responsibilities, so I intend to put more effort into my community service projects,” Anojitha told the Sunday Times Magazine.
A project officer at the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka, she is working on a project titled “Creative youth engagement for pluralism,” with four state universities. The project aims to strengthen pluralism in these campuses and give students more opportunities to work in their communities.
Anojitha has also volunteered with different organisations in Colombo, such as Interfaith Colombo, that promotes understanding, relations and trust between people of different faiths and beliefs. That gave her opportunities to work with people from different religious and ethnic backgrounds, she says.
She is also a council member of the Global Refugee Education Council (GREC), which is a part of Canada’s ‘Together for learning campaign’ and country ambassador for ‘Youth Opportunities’, a platform based in Bangladesh.
She believes social media is an important tool that can be used by young people to create dialogue that will foster peace building and spread awareness on conflict resolution, and she uses her academic and practical knowledge to do so.
“I think this is an award that many young people in Sri Lanka hope to receive for their volunteer efforts and community service
efforts. I think young people here need more recognition for their efforts. This award will definitely help with that,” Anojitha said.
Janith Prabashwara Perera, a former student of Ananda College and Vidura College in Colombo and visiting lecturer at several universities and higher education institutes has a Bachelor of Arts in Peace and Conflict Resolution from the University of Colombo.
Janith told the Sunday Times he was “changed” after volunteering for the first time at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) held in Sri Lanka in 2013. He volunteered again the following year at the 15th World Conference of Youth, and was able to gain more experience and meet more young people here.
Since then, Janith has engaged in volunteer and community service projects that focus on children and young people. In 2018 and 2019, he took part in a teacher training programme in Moratuwa. Using his skills as a lecturer and teacher, he was able to train other teachers who would later on teach children who live in the slums of Colombo.
He has also trained young people from all parts of the island in English and communication skills, for foreign exchange pro
grammes organised by the National Youth Services Council (NYSC). He says working with NYSC was an important milestone in his career.
“Young people have the potential to engage in peace building and there are many opportunities for them. From theatre to teaching to advocacy and activism there are multiple avenues for peace building,” Janith said.
Janith also conducts research on topics such as peace building, conflict resolution and extremism among young people in Sri Lanka. His research has taken him to temporary refugee centres in Negombo and Dehiwala, to meet refugees from countries such as Afghanistan and to the North and East to meet war victims.
“A lot of refugees and war victims I have met suffer from PTSD and trauma because of what they have faced. Through my research I want to bridge the gap between academic knowledge and practical knowledge, in terms of issues such as PTSD and trauma and also topics such as peace building and conflict resolution,” he said.
Winning the Diana Award this year has given him more opportunities to engage in more community service, volunteer and research projects at a grassroots level, he added.