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Kaush Weerakoon

  • Buddhism
  • Sri Lanka
  • Female
  • Sri Lanka
  • South Asia
  • KAICIID Fellows

Biography Narrative

Kaush Weerakoon is a community peacebuilder in Sri Lanka and is currently employed at the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka as a Senior Project Officer. She has contributed to establishing Communal Conflict Mitigatory Mechanisms in identified local level hotspots of religious tensions and has been involved in communal conflict mitigation and community peacebuilding interventions with religious leaders, civil society leaders and government and police officers since 2017. Her work is focused on facilitating and organising exposure visits, advocacy campaigns and capacity building trainings on conflict transformation, pluralism and non-violent communication, intra- and interfaith dialogues and mitigatory interventions to address issues of religious tensions in three selected Divisional Secretariat Division areas in Sri Lanka.

She has a Bachelor of Arts in Mass Media and a master’s degree in Development Studies from the University of Colombo. She is currently working on a Postgraduate Diploma in Conflict and Peace Studies at the same university.

Her passion is to work on community peace building in Sri Lanka with a focus on interfaith dialogue.

The motto she identifies with is: “I am what I chose to become with a vision to work for peace in my country!”.

Interreligious Activities and Initiatives

Youth Engagement for Everyday Dialogue
A fellow of KAICIID Dialogue Center, Nishantha Kumara who graduated in 2019 has initiated a project to establish Centers for Community Education and Pluralism (CCEP) in two districts namely Kegalle and Trincomalee. The CCEP brought children and youths from Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and Islam religious communities together to foster inclusion, equity and empowerment through educational opportunities. As well as CCEP will help children and youths to become community peace messengers in their respective communities and overcome community challenges in non-violent ways through strong interfaith relations. The initiative proposed a concept of “Interfaith library “, where it Established two Interfaith libraries to engage youth in the areas to be members of the library, use the resources; books, magazines, films etc. which specifically aims at building understanding on the other religions and cultures. Two interfaith libraries were setup under the resource centers which were established under CCEPs project of Master Peace Sri Lanka. This initiative is a collaboration between my self, Asia Lanka Social Development Cooperation and Master Peace Sri Lanka.