This project, led by Arun Ravindran at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and Shehan Williams at University of Kelaniya, seeks to expand a character based leadership training program for youth in Sri Lanka by extending its reach to three regions and incorporating multiple stakeholders to enhance its impact.

The LEAdership, Personal growth, and Social responsibility (LEAPS) program is a 10 module e-learning program that seeks to build character based leadership capacities using interactive activities, story-telling, and videos. Co-developed by the University of Kelaniya and the University of Toronto in 2019 with previous funding from TWCF, the LEAPS program has demonstrated efficacy in promoting tolerance, unity, and reconciliation among adolescents aged 12-14 in the Gampaha district of Sri Lanka. A pre-post evaluation using a passive control group found that students who completed the LEAPS program reported significantly improved overall character strengths and virtues such as wisdom, courage, transcendence, humility, perspective and perseverance among others.

Building on this success, this new funding will enable the team to expand the program by incorporating teachers, parents and community leaders, thus providing additional social scaffolding within which students can work on their own character development. Specifically, the project team will lead a series of in depth focus groups with relevant stakeholders. The findings from these focus groups will be used to update the LEAPS program content and delivery manual to include optional activities for parental and community involvement, and create teacher training resources. In addition, the project will be implemented in 60 schools across three districts in Sri Lanka (Colombo, Galle, and Jaffna) reaching 3,000 youth from both the Sinhala speaking majority and Tamil speaking minority.