In April 2022, a company called London Stock Exchange-Sri Lanka (LSEG-Sri Lanka) reached out to Let’s Build Great Things and asked if they could send interested volunteers from their company. What a godsend!!! Since then, they have sent us a band of volunteers who have contributed to keeping classes going non stop every Sunday since April. Here’s a highlight of Pulith’s experience. Interview conducted by LSEG-Sri Lanka. Pulith Jayarathne June 01, 2022 Community Impact What volunteering do you do and what was the positive impact? Since I joined LSEG amidst the pandemic, I was not able to take ..read more

October 06, 2019 A conversation on Religious Tolerance Today’s lesson was derived from an old thought, a larger project designed around the conversation of religious tolerance. Can art help foster this? We focused our lesson on four main religious building types in Sri Lanka, hoping to seek commonalities in the act of praying rather than through differences in belief.  How do we Pray? We started the lesson by presenting a poster designed by Irushi Tennekoon for the Daily Mirror— it was great timing indeed! Irushi and I had discussed documenting this lesson plan but never got around to i ..read more

Flying seeds, illustrated by Irushi Tennekoon September 29, 2019 Back at the Children’s center Build something that flies!  Here we have zoomed to the sixth workshop in 9 days. Phew. Things are certainly starting to get overwhelming, but I promised the students this, so I push on.  A word on Inspiration: A professor at my graduate school, Christoph Kumpusch, started our first year studio by addressing four conditions related to the ground: under, over, in and on. He gave us seemingly simple exercises that were ultimately made extremely complex by ourselves (his students) and we spen ..read more

September 26, 2019 Day 2 at Lunuganga The floods in Bentota meant that schools were closed in the area, which meant that the ‘art room’ at Lunuganga was a full house at 11am.  Prior to the class, umbrellas in hand, several of us ventured out to collect fallen tree branches from the vicinity of Lunuganga. Given that this was a beautiful garden, the pruned branches resembled the source.   Gallery Tour For this workshop, I was reunited with Shayari de Silva, my predecessor as the art teacher at the Building Hope children’s center, who convinced me to take on this art class years ago. S ..read more

September 25, 2019 Let’s Build Great Things goes to Lunuganga!  Exhibition poster taken from Barefoot Ceylon Our next two workshops were guest series, organized by the Geoffrey Bawa Trust to commemorate the Bawa 100 series - in particular, an exhibition titled ‘The Greedy Forest’ celebrating Laki Senanayake’s work. Our students were the children of the Lunuganga staff, an incredibly creative group of people themselves. It was a chaotic morning, driving to Lunuganga in near flood conditions and wondering if, after all this effort, any students would show up in this unforgiving rain ..read more

March 1, 2020 The Pearl Protectors are BACK! The Pearl Protectors were invited again by ‘Let’s Build Great Things’ to evaluate and to construct items using the Eco bricks the children had made. This follow up session was much anticipated by The Pearl Protectors since it was a brain storming session for all volunteers as to what can be constructed using the Eco-bricks. The Pearl Protectors had in previous times made Eco-bricks, but this was the first time where an item was created using the eco bricks.  Idea - To Build an Eco-brick Table and Two Stools: The children turned up at the Build ..read more

September 22, 2019 A natural material palette for today’s workshop The next day, back at the class after the tour of Apè gama, we selected a collection of natural materials that were a miniature scale of what we had seen in real life:  Coconut husks, Mud Clay, Iratu (Ekel) sticks and  Wooden popsicle and Kebab sticks.  Base board - from our friends at Anim8.lk, we scavenged for leftover pieces of foam board (usually used to mount posters) to use as a base for each house. Tip:Controlling the size of this base was crucial in order to avoid waste of ..read more

September 2019 How we met The journey towards one of the most impactful projects The Pearl Protectors has conducted started off through a random meeting of an organizer of the ‘Let’s Build Great Things’ project; Ranitri Weerasuriya at the World Clean-up day beach cleanup organized by The Pearl Protectors at the Wellawatta beach in September 2019. Ranitri, along with her parents joined in to volunteer and contributed to building Eco Bricks from waste collected from the beach. This inspired her to reach further towards taking the initiative to the children at ‘Building Hope’ Children’s center ..read more

September 20, 2019 2019 workshop, First Impressions For the 2019 workshops, we thought that the excitement of a learning tour should be re-introduced for this year as well. This time, instead of having the tour at the end of the workshops, it was held at the beginning, hoping that it would allow for more thought and discussion throughout the workshops.  This year, the 30 odd kids who signed up were mostly different from the 30 from last year, with only a few familiar faces. I wondered why that was. Did we exhaust them too much last time? Or is it a completely different (personal?) reason?  We ..read more

Illustrations by Irushi Tennekoon July 8th, 2018 De-Briefing the City Considering that yesterday was their day-long tour of the city, the students who turned up today were probably the students who really wanted to be there. Having regular turnout was something I truly appreciated. After the excitement of the tour, a student from the English class also joined the ‘art’ class.   Today’s exploration of our travels around the city was inspired by a board game called Carcassonne. For those who may not know, Carcassonne is a medieval French ..read more