When Abarna Raj saw the devastation of the 2004 earthquake in Sri Lanka and its impact on rural communities, she knew that she needed to do something to help. Now, nearly 20 years and a career change later, the not-for-profit she founded, Palmera, has helped over 10,000 vulnerable communities.
Wanting to be closer to the field, in September 2023, she and her family uprooted their lives in Sydney and moved to Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, despite not knowing the language. This meant straddling two new cultures, forging new connections within the community and of course, dealing with the scorching heat.
As a founder who has a firm hold on the programming and operations of her company, you wouldn’t expect Raj to place much significance on abstracts like dharma and destiny, but in hindsight, she’s come to realise the importance of going with the flow.
“To be honest, I didn’t realise what I was doing. I was just making a bunch of small decisions that ended up being a really big decision and now I live here in Sri Lanka with my family and my children,” she laughs.
But as a member of the diaspora who is seeking to help her home country, there’s more than just a geographical divide that needs to be bridged.
It’s common to hear people ask why Raj, who has never lived in Sri Lanka before, feels that she can solve the issues faced by people in her home country. But what makes Palmera Projects different is that it’s not about simply giving money and resources, but about building a network of people within the community who can help others as well.
Unlike other institutions which seek to simply give material resources, Palmera Projects seeks to instil a sense of agency within vulnerable communities by giving them the skills to run successful businesses and to thus secure a living income.
It’s probably no surprise that this is no easy feat. In fact, it involves building what Raj calls an “ecosystem.”
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Imagine that you’re a young woman whose husband has left, you have no skills but you have three hungry children to feed.
“We can for example bring in a sector like dairy. We don’t mean just local cows that produce one litre of milk, we bring in someone to set up a local collection centre, we bring in vets and so on. So now, after building an ecosystem that is suitable, she can confidently go and get a loan and get the second and third cow, because she knows she has the resources,” Raj explains.
All this is dependent on the funding from donors in Australia.
One such success story is that of Thevarani, aged 54, who lost her husband in the civil war. After Palmera Projects stepped in and helped her learn new farming methods and gave her the necessary resources, she was able to start farming peanuts and chillies. She now cultivates around 4 acres of land.
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Reaching these goals is likely to be difficult even for a company with a lot of resources, but as a charity, there’s an unspoken expectation that a lot must be done with little money spent. This doesn’t just mean fewer resources, but it also means that there are smaller teams and Raj, despite being the founder of the organisation, is often involved in the nitty gritty. Her responsibilities range from creating programs, to dealing with operational issues like broken down laptops, to even running the Instagram page of the organisation.
“It takes a lot of energy because you have to give so much of yourself, you have to give to communities, donors and you need to make sure you meet deadlines. Like I had my laptop in the labour room until I literally had to push because we had an event four weeks later,” she recalls.
But what keeps her going is a deep understanding of her privilege, and the importance of leveraging this to help.
“You know, sometimes as young immigrants, we feel we have to achieve all these things. We have all these expectations from our parents and our community. But eventually you realise that it’s a privilege to even have those expectations,” she says.
Not only does the organisation have a wide reach but it is also the only diaspora organisation of any ethnicity that has been accredited by the Australian Government. But Raj’s aim to ensure that Palmera Projects creates a deep and long-lasting impact means that she’s always looking forward.
“Our goal is to deepen our impact and this is not something that you achieve once. We constantly go to new communities and back because the external environment changes. So, we don’t have a numerical goal like we want to reach this many million people.”
Sri Lanka may continue to experience cycles of social and political strife, but NFPs like Palmera give hope to vulnerable communities, who are now less likely to be left behind.
