We keep an honest record. Some of the work we are proudest of has won nothing. Some of what's listed here changed what we could do next. Both, we think, are worth writing down.
Nethmi Wijesekara and Mira Sutharsan invited to convene a 40-minute practitioner session on vernacular mental-health design in post-conflict communities. The work itself stays where it belongs — in the villages where it's made.
Honoured for community-built climate adaptation infrastructure. The Mannar fishers' cooperative travelled to the ceremony; we did not.
The Festival jury cited Pasal's deliberate non-clinicalisation and Tamil-first vocabulary as work that changes what a service can be.
One of seventeen practitioners shortlisted internationally for "courageous leadership in conditions of fragility." She declined to travel, sent a five-minute audio note instead.
Listed among 100 government-innovation initiatives worldwide for "removing friction between citizens and the rule of law."
Our argument that the dominant lab cadence (12-week sprints, demo-day exits) is structurally incompatible with the communities we serve. Read by 38,000+ practitioners in its first three months.
UN-Habitat included Veedu's "family-as-architect" workshop in the 2023 Global Catalogue of practices in post-conflict housing recovery.
We accepted the award jointly with the Bar Association of Northern Province and the seventeen panchayats running it.
For "the quiet radicalism of placing the pen in the homeowner's hand." The award funded the third year of the programme.
Our retired-teachers-as-library-aunties reading model included in Index Project's 2021 international longlist of community design initiatives.
An eighteen-month grant that funded the build, the Tamil typesetting, and the audit-trail system. Code remains under CC BY-SA, on a Git server we host in Colombo.
We declined three grants since 2019 because the timeline was too short, the deliverable was too narrow, or the framing required us to call something "empowerment" that was simply work.