Learning good values with a bit of fun
19-year-old Anagi Gunasekera wants to take her ‘Goodville Program’ that emerged from a school project, to more rural schools
Inspiration strikes when least expected. For 19-year-old Anagi Gunasekera her business project for school became an initiative to inspire and encourage young children to engage in good deeds and develop good values such as empathy, kindness, respect and humility.
The school project, which involved coming up with a video advertising campaign for everyone’s favourite cookie, the Oreo, inspired Anagi to think about how the goodness of humanity comes from within us, not unlike the cream inside the cookie which makes the cookie what it is.
Using her musical background, she then wrote and composed a catchy song to go with the campaign. Substituting the Oreo with a generic cookie, she came up with the Goodville Program, which in a nutshell, means ‘the will to do good’.
The Goodville Program aims to inculcate good values in young children, from ages three to eight. The programme is centred on three original cartoon characters - Goody, Jolly and Sweety - in the town of Goodville and includes different activities, games, arts and crafts, and music which makes learning these values a fun and engaging experience for children. Starting with a small star chart activity tried out in a few classes of the nursery of Ladies’ College (her alma mater) during the latter part of the COVID lockdowns, she was taken aback by the very positive feedback from both parents and children.
Anagi then teamed up with the non-profit organisation, Bridge2Peace where she conducted the programme in preschools in Diyathalawa and Lunugamvehera. “Some of those kids come from broken homes and there’s a lot of abuse and a lot of negativity,” says Anagi. “I got to talk to the parents about having this positive environment and being kind, empathetic and understanding and then from there, I realised there was another avenue through my programme so I want to reach out to more children in those rural areas coming from such backgrounds.”
Anagi would also like to transform the way children are taught right and wrong and change it from a punitive method into a more positive and constructive one.She has created a game-style goodness tracker board which is currently being implemented in the Ladies’ College kindergarten. “It’s useful to have these values and I think that is something that you don’t prioritise a lot of the time. Through this programme and through all the positive game-style activities, handcrafts, and the characters which attract the child’s attention because children like cartoons (which was actually why I came up with cartoon characters in the first place), we get the kids to be motivated.”
To date, Anagi has worked with almost 700 children and parents and most recently conducted a Goodville camp in October. Her efforts were recognised when she received the ‘Well-Being Award’ at the 2023 New Generation Awards organised by Women in Management and the National Youth Services Council. The award recognizes organisations and individuals who take great care to promote the well-being of children and young people, as well as ensuring that families can stay together.
“I think that this award does mean a lot to me because it just gave me more motivation that I can do bigger things with my programme,” says Anagi.
Her future plans are to take the Goodville Project to more parts of the country, work with different sorts of organizations and present the programme in different ways. She hopes that through the guide she’s working on and hopefully a website, everyone, not just in Sri Lanka, but the rest of world can also access it.
When not busy with her passion project, Anagi is a serious musician working towards a music diploma while also being a part of the Junior Symphony Orchestra of Sri Lanka.