Beyond Borders is a space for young people to work on development issues. We are quite explicit about that mandate. We don’t run eye-clinics, beach cleaning campaigns or distribute lunch packets. We think those are worthy causes but we also know there are many excellent charity organizations already working these issues.

Our focus is on making a long-term impact on social and development issues; we aim to create platforms for young people to both express themselves and take action to bring about long-term, incremental and sustainable change.

We are heavily invested in the practice of creating what we call ‘think-spaces’. We conduct workshops, youth camps, seminars and open discussion forums on a variety of topics largely based on peace, governance and citizenship issues. We also communicate with broader audiences through publications, new media and forum theatre. We think ideas are powerful and we think changing minds and attitudes is a big part of making a society which respects identity, appreciate diversity and promotes active global citizenship.

Most of our work revolves around peer-education initiatives. As a voluntary youth-led organization, we feel that’s our strength. We work with others in the civil society to help create a better country and a better world, one step at a time.

For the moment, we have three main program areas:

As young people growing up in Sri Lanka, we belong to the “war generation” – the generation that has never seen peace. As a generation which came of age in the midst of bombs, violence and death counts read as if they were cricket scores, majority of young people have not only developed a sense of apathy towards these issues, but we have witnessed a gradual deterioration of spaces youth can express themselves freely.

As a way of breaking this self-reinforcing cycle, the Peace and governance program area of Beyond Borders is working on a project which aims to document and publish youth responses on the conflict both online and as a published reader, something which does not exist at the moment. We feel this is one way of influencing academia, civil society actors and policymakers on such a macro issue.

The project includes setting up ‘study circles’ consisting of young people with a deep interest in these issues and have the potential to influence the political mainstream, we also hope to regional youth forums in five different regions in the country and explore the possibility of setting up regional study circles.

These components and additional research will primarily feed into the publication in print and on the web in our project blog, as videos and podcasts.

Democracy assumes an informed citizenry, looking at Sri Lanka we realized we are in trouble. We don’t think we can eradicate ignorance or misconceptions, but we feel we can make an impact on a critical mass of people. This we hope will translate better choices both at the voting booth and living in a society.

We conduct workshops, seminars, youth camps based on a peer-education model to create an informed active citizenry living in a better society.
At the moment, we are working on creating a resource pack on citizenship education which can be used activists, teachers, youth organizations, CBOs and NGOs to educate young people on citizenship issues.

We found the theatre forum to be an excellent medium to explore complex issues in our society. We periodically organize forum theatres to complete our other projects or at the request of civil society organizations in a variety of topics.