Category: Other Projects

ECO-V won the Green Community Commitment of the Year 2023 Award from the Green Building Council of Sri Lanka. Our sister organisation has been working towards environmental sustainability for 22 years, and we are thrilled they received this recognition. Like JCJ, ECO-V believes in taking individual responsibility for protecting the environment and is committed to continuing their work with hope and passion.

Kanchana Weerakoon, the Founder for Eco-V, told JCJ;
“22 years of our journey in volunteering towards protecting environment was not an easy one but we all walk along in that path with hope and having responsibility for individual commitments.“

JCJ would like to thank ECO-V for all their hard work over the years with lifting Sri-Lankan’s environmental consciousness. They have constantly inspired JCJ and we wouldn’t have the opportunity to support such great projects without their ingenuity and passion.

We look forward to continuing our organisations’ strong bond and work on many projects together in the future.

JCJ provided support to our sister organisation ECO-V to set up and run another Metta Garden in one of the largest schools of Sri Lanka. Metta Gardens aim to remake the connection between nature and the younger generation who now mostly live within urban areas, as well as to improve the local biodiversity and provide a solution to the Sri Lankan food crisis.

ECO-V have refocused their efforts on Metta Gardens and nurseries during COVID and the economic situation in Sri Lanka, that have prevented them from running the usual Yathra projects.

The school that this Metta Garden has been built on is one of the most reputable school in Colombo. So the message of the Metta Gardens will spread to the large number of school attendees, parents, and local community members.

Trained green leaders through Sri Lankan Yathras are always in action!

This is Dhanushka who participated in many yathras conducted by ECO-V in Sri Lanka co-sponsored by JCJ. He now maintains his own plant nursery, which JCJ helped fund.

He plants them with his young team and also gives away plants to people who are requesting more for tree planting campaigns.

JCJ continues to support these youth in Sri Lanka.

Newton’s Nursery

Islyan Newton, a youth leader trained during the first Yathra (Journey) in 2011, has been busy during COVID-19 maintaining a native plant nursery that JCJ has supported. 140 plants were given away in November 2020 to be cultivated in the fields of northern Sri Lanka.

In January, Newton conducted a full-day workshop for 25 young people. The workshop raised awareness about healthy food, natural living and sustainable waste management. He gave some plants from his nursery to each attendee to care for, and the rest are to be maintained collectively by the group.

Gayani’s Nursery

During COVID-19, Gayani’s work with garden training sessions from ECO-V (our sister organisation in Sri Lanka) dried up. At that time there was a growing demand for indoor air purifying plants, and so she was given some of JCJ’s funds to start and maintain a nursery for 6 months.

When she went back to work in January, the plants were big enough to start selling. Despite COVID-19 still ravaging the country and making sales very difficult, she has already managed to sell some to an online store.

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Nava, an ECO-V 2018 Yathra trainee, started running a weekend cycling project to get young people involved in nature in the highly biodiverse Jaffna peninsula in Sri Lanka’s north. Nava’s dream is to make Jaffna a cycling destination by 2030. We were happy to support this initiative by providing some initial money to purchase food for the attendees.

CJ is encouraging supporters to help fund a documentary on climate justice in Bangladesh and West Bengal. Filmmakers Samantha Hunter and Sarah Dodamead will depict the effects of climate change and the hardships imposed upon the lives of the local people. 

“We want to raise awareness of the social injustices of climate change, how those most severely impacted upon are often those who have contributed the least to the problem.

“We want to make those in the carbon-intensive developed world recognize that they have a social responsibility not only to drastically reduce their GHG emissions, but to support those most affected to be able to adapt and cope.

“Through this documentary, we hope to build solidarity between the Global North and the Global South on the issue of climate change”.

JCJ is contributing directly, but we would love to see you help to boost the funding we can offer. Please go to our Donate page. Long-standing JCJ supporter Pat Kirkby is on the advisory board for the project.

Samantha (left) is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and alumni of Florida State University, and Sarah (right) is a Critical Language Scholarship fellow and undergraduate at the same university.

JCJ supported a ‘Climate Photo-Voice’ project. This used visual storytelling to document, share, and showcase grassroots responses to climate impacts across urban communities in Bangladesh, China and Australia. Photo-voice workshops are an ideal mechanism to drive awareness and behaviour change. Over two years, Australian photographer Micheal Chew partnered with the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) to run workshops in Dhaka, Bangladesh with around 100 youth aged 15-30. In 2019 and 2020, successful exhibitions were held in Dhaka and Melbourne, Australia to showcase the results.

In September 2015, JCJ sent technical expert Stephen Bygrave, CEO of Beyond Zero Emissions (BZE), to Sri Lanka to engage with environmentalists, NGOs, government officials, industry leaders, and youth activists, aiming to support the country’s transition to 100% renewable energy. Drawing on BZE’s extensive research in Australia, which outlines a technically feasible no-coal pathway to full renewables, Stephen shared insights and strategies to demonstrate how such a transition could be achieved in Sri Lanka.

During his visit, Stephen participated in key events, including a forum organized by the Chamber of Commerce attended by 67 representatives from business and government agencies such as the Climate Change Secretariat. He also took part in Kolomba Yathra, a youth-led march and gathering organised by ECO-V, whose past initiatives have been supported by JCJ. In addition to addressing a large conference of over 300 attendees, Stephen held one-on-one meetings with high-level figures, including the Minister for Megapolis and Western Development (formerly the Energy Minister), and Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne, the founder of Sarvodaya—Sri Lanka’s largest NGO.

Stephen noted the strong sense of collaboration among NGOs, openness from government stakeholders, and the positive energy from all involved. He emphasized that he gained as much from the experience as he shared, particularly in light of Sri Lanka’s own commitment to achieving 100% renewables.

The visit received significant media coverage from outlets such as the Daily Mirror Financial Times, Ceylon Today Financial Times, and Ceylon Daily News, helping to bring national attention to the vision of a renewable-powered future for Sri Lanka.