Where it came from
Three decades of civil war left a deep mark on Sri Lanka’s socio-economic and environmental ecosystems.
Wherever there is conflict in the global South, the international aid organisations are there, and much of that work mattered. But the imported solutions, from policies to products to programmes, were not sustainably solving these fundamental challenges. Too often they were designed without the people who knew the problem.
DreamSpace Academy was founded in Batticaloa on 30 September 2018, by Aravinth Panch and Kishoth Navaretnarajah.
The criticism there is of the solutions, not of money or of outside knowledge. Grant funding is one of the three sources that pay for this work. And the statement makes no claim about unemployment in any region: it says the war reshaped communities, economies and environments.
The purpose, mission and vision below have to stay true wherever the work runs, so none of them names a place.
The belief
The people closest to a challenge are the ones best placed to solve it.
Not because local knowledge is always enough; often it is not, and the tools, capital and expertise a solution needs may come from anywhere. But because a solution that is locally owned can be adapted when conditions change, and defended when they get hard.
What the people closest to a challenge most often lack is not the insight. It is the capability: the skill, tools, networks, capital, permission and standing that turn insight into a solution.
The person solving the problem has to be local. The tools, money and expertise do not. That is what separates this from localism, and research on grassroots innovation draws the same line when it describes empathetic innovation: a trained local person solving a problem that is not their own[47].
This is a belief, not a measured claim.
The purpose
To put the capability to solve local challenges into local hands, and the conditions that keep it there.
Three of those words have a specific meaning here.
| Word | What it means here | What it is not |
|---|---|---|
| Capability | Skill, plus the tools, network, capital, permission, a problem worth solving, and standing enough to be heard. | Not “capacity building”, and not “self-reliance”. |
| Local | A relation, not a location, local to wherever the work is happening. | Not a synonym for Batticaloa, or the statement would stop being true elsewhere. |
| The conditions | The surrounding layer: tools, networks, capital, institutions, knowledge flow, and the people who renew them. | Not a claim that those conditions already exist, or are sufficient. |
The purpose names no method: no making, no makerspace, no technology. It names no age group and no place. And it does not say that DreamSpace Academy solves the challenges. Capability moves, and the community solves.
The definition
DreamSpace Academy is a non-profit social enterprise that co-creates an ecosystem to tackle local socio-economic and environmental challenges through education, innovation and entrepreneurship.
Each clause answers the question the one before it raises.
| Clause | Answers |
|---|---|
| a non-profit social enterprise | What it is, the legal and structural form. |
| co-creates | How it works, the manner of the whole thing, not one stage of it. |
| an ecosystem | What it builds. The academy is not the ecosystem; it builds one. |
| to tackle local socio-economic and environmental challenges | What the ecosystem is for. |
| through education, innovation and entrepreneurship | What it works through, the three pillars. |
The phrase describes a structure, not a funding position. It does not claim independence from grants, and it does not admit dependence on them. The work is paid for from three sources and none of them is ranked, because the shares have never been measured. See how the work is funded.
A co-founder’s 2019 keynote described DreamSpace Academy as a community innovation centre in Sri Lanka set up to tackle socio-economic and environmental challenges. Two things have changed since: the method came out of the sentence, and what gets built became an ecosystem rather than a centre.
The mission
Co-creating with underserved communities the capability to keep solving their own challenges, through education, innovation and entrepreneurship.
Two words have a specific meaning. Underserved says who the work is with. It is a test about access, applied one axis at a time: distance from provision, language, disability, income, gender, displacement. It is not a label attached to a district. Keep is the continuity commitment. A community should be able to go on solving its own problems after a particular programme has ended.
The community solves its own challenges. The academy is not the one solving them.
The vision
Communities solving their own challenges.
The goal: one hundred local challenges solved by local people, by 2050.
DreamSpace Academy is building a self-sustaining ecosystem where local and international changemakers co-learn, co-innovate and co-produce.
The goal counts something specific, and the test already exists. A local challenge counts as solved when three things are true: the problem came from the community, a user outside the makerspace has tested the solution, and somebody depends on the outcome. That is the same test used on the DreamSpace Lifecycle, with a number and a date attached.
There is no running counter against that goal, and there will not be one until a baseline exists. The academy's historical figures count candidates and participants, not solved challenges. A number built from them would report several years of work wrongly. The test exists; the baseline does not.
Values and standards
Eight values, grouped into three ideas.
Agency
Locally rooted · co-creation · the route is theirs to choose · radical inclusion.
Honesty
Openness, about the work · transparency, about the organisation.
What the work is for
Peace · regeneration.
Each value resolves into a standard of practice that can be checked from outside.
| Standard | What it commits the academy to |
|---|---|
| Nothing about the community without the community | Local partners in every operation; indicators defined with the people they describe. |
| Build the capability, not the dependency | Programmes are designed so that the capability stays locally after they end. |
| Meet people where they are | Placement by what someone can demonstrate rather than by age band; basics first where basics are missing. |
| A changemaker’s route is theirs to choose | The route branches rather than funnels. Leaving for study, employment or something else is not a failure. |
| Open by default | Open hardware, open protocols, open publication, open networks. |
| Learn by doing, and finish the thing | The completion standard described under assessment. |
| Bridge both ways | Bring the world in; take local work out. |
What the academy will not claim
These rules are internal discipline. They are published because over-promising livelihoods in a post-conflict setting is a risk in itself, not only an evidential problem: raised expectations that are not met are documented as feeding new grievance[68].
- That this pathway produces durable income is not asserted. That entrepreneurship contributes to economic development is well evidenced. Whether a rural maker-to-venture pathway does the same, and at what rate, is not. The unproven claim is DreamSpace Academy’s, not the field’s.
- Failures and partial cases are reported alongside successes, so that the record is not only of the work that survived.
- Outcomes that came through the founders’ own networks are reported separately from those that came through open intake. Putting them together inflates any success rate and makes it useless to anybody else.
- The academy does not describe itself as independent of funding until the earned-revenue share has been measured.
- Every empirical claim points to a source, and where a figure is something the academy states rather than something it has computed, the text says so.
Peace and regeneration have no behaviour standard attached to them, and that is recorded rather than invented. For peace there is a candidate already in view: publishing grant criteria in advance, giving every unsuccessful applicant a written reason, and publishing the geography and referral route of those selected. It is under consideration and has not been adopted. Regeneration has no candidate at all.
The category
DreamSpace Academy is an Innovation & Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Builder for sustainable development.
The academy is not the ecosystem; it builds one. The category names no method. Making, and the MakerSpace, are how a great deal of the work gets done, but a method should not be what defines an organisation, so that framing sits on the MakerSpace’s own pages.
What the ecosystem produces is largely unmeasured. The evidence for this identity is what has been built, not yet what has come out of it.
The tagline
Co-Creating The Dreams
The Dreams are the futures that become possible for a community when its people, knowledge, culture and opportunity come together. They are collective, they change over time, and they are never a fixed list. DreamSpace is not a place where dreams are pursued. It is a place where new ones become imaginable.
The Dreams are collective; the route through them is individual. Someone who takes a job instead of founding a venture, goes into research, or leaves entirely has not failed them.