Sri Lanka: Employee Volunteering

Getting involved

Mehewara, (Sinhala for social service) is a formal scheme designed to accommodate the desire of many of Unilever Sri Lanka’s employees to get personally involved in community work. Unilever fully endorses and encourages the idea of employees taking a hands-on approach, and has taken the progressive step of offering employees one week of paid leave each year to work for a charitable cause of their choice. While this initiative is independent of Unilever’s own social responsibility projects, some employees choose to participate in these projects. Mehewara encourages employees to work in teams to build camaraderie, and plans to expand the scheme to include families of employees as well.

Making wishes come true

Projects carried out by Mehewara teams in 2008 included: setting up a new library for a government school in the neighbourhood of Unilever’s Grandpass factory; working with a group of partially blind children from the Deaf and Blind school in Ratmalana to create greeting cards, which were then used as ecards by Unilever; and a ‘make a wish come true’ programme for 21 children from a children’s home in Maharagama, where employees treated the children to a funfilled day out complete with a picnic in the park and a movie, capped by armfuls of gifts to take home.