Rotary’s alumni honoree works to transform mindsets in peacebuilding efforts
As a child during Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war, Pushpi Weerakoon planned to become a lawyer. “I was born into a civil conflict, walked minutes away from bomb blasts, and saw parents of my schoolmates killed,” Weerakoon said. “From a very early stage, I understood the cost of conflict, and I knew I had to do something about it.”
In 1999, with Sri Lanka a member of the British Commonwealth, Weerakoon headed to the University of Buckingham in the UK. There she earned a bachelor of law and a postgraduate diploma in international and commercial law.
Weerakoon fully intended to continue traveling down the barrister’s path, but nature intervened. She was visiting Sri Lanka from England when, on 26 December 2004, an earthquake erupted beneath the Indian Ocean off the northwest coast of Sumatra, an Indonesian island. The most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Asia and one of the deadliest natural disasters in history, it spawned a monumental tsunami that hit Sri Lanka and more than a dozen other countries and left more than 220,000 people dead.
Image credit: Monika Lozinska
Moved by the devastation, she began volunteering with groups to help survivors. The director of the country’s Alternative Dispute Resolution Institute asked her to train grassroots leaders in mediation, drawing on her law education. “After the tsunami,” Weerakoon explained, “so many small claims clogged up the main court system.” It was hoped that those newly trained leaders could help resolve contentious issues in Sri Lanka’s well-established community-based mediation boards.
She traveled throughout the country holding mediation workshops for three weeks of every month for two years. Because the country was approaching the final stages of the civil war, she was accompanied by members of the military into high security zones.
“Remember,” she said, “I was trained to be a lawyer, where you think in terms of black and white and then punishment.” But in a situation where combatants on both sides think they’re right, Weerakoon continued, “that’s not a matter of black and white. It’s a matter of transforming mindsets, about opening up and sharing thoughts and values and ideas — and the law doesn’t exactly help that.
“With that thought, I came back home, and that was it. I decided I’m not going to be a traditional lawyer.”
What followed were years of additional study and an impressive aggregation of degrees on her way to becoming an internationally respected peacebuilder, supported by Rotary at multiple steps along the way. She received an MBA from the University of Wales, a master’s in conflict transformation at Eastern Mennonite University (with the help of a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship), a master’s in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and a PhD in peace and conflict studies at the University for Peace.
Pushpi Weerakoon
- Rotary Peace Fellowship, 2007
- Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship, 2009
- Rotary Alumni Global Service Award, 2024-25
She also studied at the Rotary Peace Center at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, earning a diploma in peace studies and conflict resolution. “Chula was very hands-on,” said Weerakoon, clearly impressed with the peace center program. “It’s not this theory and that theory. It was very practical: If it’s a class on mediation, you sit down and actually mediate.”
There were also trips in the field where peace fellows interacted with Indigenous people whose lives and livelihoods were threatened by plans for a hydroelectric dam. “What Rotary exposed me to was like gold,” she said. “The experience to see it, and then now having to actually do it.”
Impressive as they are, Weerakoon’s academic achievements served more as steppingstones rather than as goals in themselves. In Sri Lanka, she served as the coordinator of the National Reconciliation Secretariat and, in 2016-17, the civil society coordinator for the country in the Open Government Partnership, a global initiative that promotes collaboration between government ministries and nongovernmental organizations. In that role, she helped craft a national action plan to address crucial issues related to health, the environment, corruption, and access to information.
For the last nine years, Weerakoon has worked at the United Nations International Organization for Migration, where she has taken leading roles not only in Sri Lanka, but in such far-ranging destinations as El Salvador, the Bahamas, and Micronesia, mediating disputes, supporting disaster recovery, and combating sexual violence. In Bangladesh, home to Kutupalong, the largest refugee settlement in the world, Weerakoon served as IOM’s refugee support officer. In that capacity she helped design a social cohesion strategy and coordinated efforts to address the Rohingya refugee crisis.
At the convention in Calgary, Weerakoon receives the Rotary Alumni Global Service Award from Rotary leaders Stephanie Urchick and Mark Maloney.
Image credit: Christophe Viseux
In June, Weerakoon was honored for her work with the Rotary Alumni Global Service Award at the Rotary International Convention in Calgary. During her seven-minute speech, she challenged Rotary members to ensure that graduating peace fellows have the resources to best employ their newly acquired skills. “Rotary does not just spark change,” she said. “It cultivates generations of it. Let’s make sure we have the valuable insights from the post-fellow fraternity … that will help Rotary build a mechanism to continue to carry the legacy forward.”
Her speech offered only hints of the things she has accomplished as an internationally respected peacebuilder. Instead, she emphasized how Rotary had been there for her at each step of her life’s journey. “What Rotary gave me wasn’t just scholarships,” she said. “It was a family, a belonging. It was the certainty that, no matter where I am, I would not be alone.”
This story originally appeared in the January 2026 issue of Rotary magazine.