Collaboration with the Tea Leaf Trust

The Tea Leaf Trust was founded in 2007, shortly after Tim & Yasmeen visited Sri Lanka on their honeymoon, to empower impoverished young people from the tea estates through education, employment and ethnic cohesion.

By observing the many crosscutting issues affecting the development of the estates and the people who live on them, it became apparent to the Tea Leaf Trust board members that the focus of their work had to be on more than just formal education. Although their projects would work to enhance the future prospects of youth through a focus on employability skills and English, goals were also developed to focus on the bottom-up transformation of these exploited communities through engaging their young people, who represent a key generation following the end of the 25-year civil war, as well as the future of Sri Lanka. Tea Leaf Trust had to develop methods of empowerment and a desire for growth amongst these young people to become positive and engaged ‘change agents’ within their communities.

Teardrop Hotels Projects with Tea Leaf Trust

Introduction to Hospitality Course with Tea Leaf Trust

Teardrop Hotels will be collaborating with Tea Leaf Trust on an Introduction to Hospitality Course, targeted to start May 2023.
We will also offer paid internships to the best performing students from the program and offer paid internships and provide hotel tours for the students and parents to break the stigma attached to hotels in these communities.

CEP (Children’s English Program) in partnership with Tea Leaf Trust

Our goal is to raise $10,000 through guest donations/in-house and online donations via the website, which would allow 300 hardworking students to be trained and developed to teach structured English classes to 3,000 kids in government schools who would have otherwise not had access to these classes.

Allocation of Funds

• Trains 150 students with the teaching skills to run the CEP. These skills include leadership, classroom management, teaching, data recording. The biggest impact is on their emotional health, giving them a sense of purpose, building confidence and character.
• These 150 student-teachers from the Tea Leaf Muskeliya Center travel to over 30 government primary schools to teach over 2,000 children weekly, structured English classes for free.
• These children gain a minimum of 40 hours of Basic English lessons through the year – which is otherwise unaffordable or inaccessible.Since 2010, 15,551 school children have completed the Children’s English Programme delivered by TLV students.
• $25 will support 10 kids to access the programme for one month.
• Include Muskeliya Tea Leaf Center in our experiences and moving forward include the Nanayoya Center as well – to create more awareness and drive guests’ donations for the centers

Impact of the Donations

• $50 – purchases carefully-chosen books for a class of children learning crucial English for the first time
• $100 – enables 3 hardworking students to be trained and developed to deliver engaging, fun lessons for 30 children
• $150 – enables 100 children to access part-time English classes for one month
• $ 200 – covers a month’s management costs for 180 student-teachers to teach over 2,000 children at 30+ centre.

For more information click here