Our Work at LEADS
Discover how LEADS is making a meaningful impact across Sri Lanka through initiatives focused on safeguarding children, empowering communities, responding to emergencies, and pioneering special initiatives for positive social change.
Safeguarding Children
Ensuring a Safe Haven for Every Child
Our work is centred around our mandate of creating safer spaces and brighter futures for the children of our country. LEADS’ main interventions thereby lie in child protection and child rights promotion where we provide restorative care for survivors of child abuse and create broader awareness on the issue of child abuse among communities across our island home so as to safeguard children at risk of abuse.
Caring for Survivors of Child Abuse
LEADS has a specialised team of mental health practitioners and equipped caregivers to provide for the psychosocial needs of survivors of child abuse. Residential and non-residential therapeutic care are provided through LEADS’ centres in Jaffna, Badulla and Colombo to ensure that the young survivors receive holistic restorative care. LEADS also provides legal aid and guidance throughout the legal processes to support the children and minimise revictimisation of survivors of child abuse. LEADS conducts follow-up counselling with the children’s families so that the survivors return to a safe and secure environment. With its reintegration support, LEADS also ensures that the children return to normalcy either by returning to school or receiving vocational training needed to build back a brighter future for themselves.
Creating Awareness on Child Protection
Through its training unit, LEADS creates broader awareness on the rights of children while equipping community leaders and other stakeholders to ensure safer spaces for children within their communities and institutions. Regular trainings are thereby conducted with local Child Rights Promotion Officers (CRPOs), faith leaders, corporates, teachers, parents and students all across Sri Lanka. Through a special Training of Trainers’ intervention, preschool teachers and other stakeholders are equipped to continue raising awareness on child protection at grassroots level. LEADS also contributes special tools such as educational materials and publications to ensure that children across all age groups are made aware of their rights and how to protect themselves from incidents of abuse.
Advocating for Change
LEADS Advocacy unit consists of a team of lawyers and advocates who not only provide legal aid for survivors of child abuse but also lobbies for the implementation of child rights and child protection policies at national policy and grassroots levels. Through this unit LEADS works closely with like-minded organisations and government agencies such as the National Child Protection Authority to ensure that communities of Sri Lanka have improved access to their rights and are better equipped to provide safer spaces for their children.
Empowering Communities
Empowering Communities for Development
LEADS believes that every person has the inherent right to equitable opportunities, economic sufficiency and social justice. It is thereby committed to transform underprivileged and vulnerable communities into communities that are empowered and equipped to attain sustainable development through their own means. This is a process that requires a comprehensive assessment of needs and socio-economic barriers that prevent the impoverished and the marginalised from reaching adequate living standards. LEADS’ Community Transformation Unit implements specially designed Child-Focused Community Development initiatives with the aim of promoting community participation at all levels of interventions and empowering identified communities to take ownership of their village development, while ensuring that all households are equipped to sustain their families’ needs. Thus, communities across Sri Lanka are weaned off a state of dependency and adequately empowered to be responsible stakeholders of sustainable development.
Responding to Emergencies
Emergency Relief and Preparedness
LEADS reaches out to communities affected by socio-natural disasters in times of dire need. LEADS distributes emergency relief packs consisting of both food and non-food items, for communities affected by the various emergency situations that arise in the country, be it natural calamities such as floods and landslides, man-made disasters such as the Easter attacks in 2019, emergency situations like the COVID-19 pandemic or the recent economic crisis. LEADS also provides psychosocial support for survivors of tragic calamities and provides support in the form of post-disaster recovery assistance in a bid to help those affected return to normalcy.
Special Initiatives
Innovative Initiatives for Sustainable Impact
LEADS goes beyond its main areas of work with the aim of widening its reach and sustaining its work in creating brighter tomorrows for the children of Sri Lanka. Through its social enterprise ventures, LEADS has successfully established the production of soil blocks as an alternative building material in Mannar. This venture promotes sustainable and environmentally conscious practices, reiterating LEADS’ stance on creation care while also working with rural and marginalised communities. LEADS also patronises the ANIMiSA (Alliance of National Institutions Mitigating Substance Abuse) network and supports its efforts in creating awareness on substance abuse and providing rehabilitative care for persons struggling with addictions.
