Samitha Sugathimala | British Council Sri Lanka

In 2015 FISD (Foundation for Innovative Social Development) attended a British Council Active Citizens discussion on gender and this was followed by a meeting to discuss the experience and the expertise we had on gender equality and women’s empowerment. We were quite impressed with the Active Citizen methodology/toolkit and immediately wanted to adopt the method to all our women and youth leadership training. My five days experience at the Active Citizens facilitators training was amazing. The Active Citizen project showcase was also a memorable experience as I was able to bring down our community leaders to this international event and give them the opportunity to build their image.

In 2017 we were part of the WOW festival and following that received a small grant for ‘Voices and Choices’ women’s projects with the BC arts and culture unit. And then in 2018, we won the proposal as a lead applicant on the British Council project on ‘Empowering communities to end violence against women and girls’.

We were quite impressed with the Active Citizen methodology/toolkit and immediately wanted to adopt the method to all our women and youth leadership training.

I would say that it was a very enriching relationship where both parties learned and experienced a lot from each other while contributing to creating a better society for women and youth. The relationship with the British Council helped to build the image of my organisation and contributed to its scaling up. It is indeed a very productive relationship.

For FISD the partnership with the British Council created a space where my organisation had the opportunity to grow and scale-up. And most of all the Active Citizen methodology is something that allows community leaders to take the ownership of their contributions in all aspects of project initiation from designing, implementation to finally enjoying the impact. It helps to move away from service delivery model (a model which create a dependency in communities) to a sustainable community ownership model.