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10.19.2006  This photograph was taken at the opening of an MJF Foundation Preschool in southern Sri Lanka. The little girl’s traditional gesture of thanks is  warm and heartfelt. She and fifty friends have for the first time, a preschool with educational toys, trained teachers and a caring environment.
The MJF Foundation will open eight similar preschools, which will nurture around 600 children every year. The same gratitude is expressed there by the children whose lives will be transformed by this free school. Yet more gratitude from fishermen, their families, and from entrepreneurs who benefited from Foundation grants, boats, nets and engines. You can see their smiles if you visit the ‘Smiles of Hope’ section of this website. It is in fact we who should be grateful, not they. These people are victims of a flawed system in which the notion of social justice is usurped by an economic structure that defines success as profit. They have been marginalized by a global economy that ignores certain social obligations when establishing its definition of success or failure. We must be apologetic therefore for the unimaginable hardship they are forced to endure every day by their circumstances. The MJF Charitable Foundation has so far been able to help several communities numbering over 5,000 people, to recover from a devastating tsunami and rebuild their lives. That help was made possible by revenues from the sale of Dilmah Tea. The philosophy that drives this effort is that Dilmah’s success is a outcome of a combination of the quality of Ceylon’s famous tea, and the efforts of workers and the community. In launching his brand of tea in 1988, Founder Merrill J. Fernando made a pledge that Dilmah would be an ethical tea, the producer’s own brand of tea; and the producer would benefit from it. Hence, rewards from Dilmah flow back to Ceylon’s tea industry, to its workers and to the wider community. Is the same relationship not true of most brands and products? As the pursuit of profit leads to relentless cost cutting, an important element is being forgotten; the social obligation. In the West that obligation is sometimes protected by law, and that has increased the operating costs of business. In the East, it is often not so, and that has attracted Western manufacturers with the prospect of manufacturing cheaper than at home. There is a genuine saving sometimes, but most often that saving is the result of compromising on the social obligation. If every brand of tea were to subscribe to the same values as Dilmah, together we could change the lives of millions of underprivileged people. Equally, if the lives of people who are directly or indirectly involved in producing a product were considered in determining success or failure, we could make a much greater change. The tsunami was nobody’s fault, and its consequences cannot be blamed on anyone. It exposes though a fundamental contradiction in our economic system and the reason why poverty is being perpetuated. People and their needs are most often irrelevant. If we could change that, the results the MJF Foundation has experienced in our tsunami relief programmes, would be magnified a million times, by as many brands and businesses that wished to consider the real cost of their product – the financial cost + the social and environmental cost. |
