As a volunteer after the Asian tsunami in 2005, I had a lifechanging moment when I held a tiny baby girl in a state orphanage who I believed to be an orphan. Our hearts beat together in synchronicity and a silent promise was made to do something to help. Piyumi means lotus flower and the meaning to lotus flower is to transform from the darkest depths of the pond into something beautiful.

Their Future Today, TFT, TransFormaTion was born.

A restoration of the orphanage came first, employment of housemothers came next followed by childcare specialist training.

We discovered more than 80% of children in orphanages globally are not orphans, but are most often abandoned through homelessness and poverty. 

In 2010, Piyumi and her brother Isuru were the first children to be reunited with their mother in a house funded by TFT supporters and since then thousands of lives have been transformed through our holistic model to end institutionalisation.

Our Heartbeat Centre provides probono lawyering support for women and girls escaping gender based violence, and safe shelter to keep single mothers and babies together and out of orphanages. We opened TFT International Preschool in 2015 to provide safe childcare to prevent abandonment and early learning of excellence and English education. (Now renamed Mercury Holidays - TFT International Preschool). We're enabling education for thousands of the poorest children, creating English language Activity rooms in schools, livelihood programmes for single mothers, vocational training for institutionalised girl victims of sexual abuse, and alternative family and foster care training for National Childcare services where we influenced the first Alternative Family Care Policy for Children in Sri Lanka. 

A first foster care system was due to be implemented in 2020 with an aim to close the first state institution.

The long and strict Covid19 pandemic lockdowns meant no income at all for daily wage earners, and our focus was to keep vulnerable families fed and together. 

To date TFT has provided approximately 400,000 meals. 

Now this beautiful paradise island of Sri Lanka is facing the worst economic and humanitarian crisis in living memory, affecting every aspect of the lives of the 22 m people who live there. Severe food, gas and fuel shortages have meant drivers have died waiting in hot six-hour-long queues, and 13hour daily power cuts which are affecting businesses, supermarkets, and hospitals which have had to cancel operations. Poor rural families and children who were already struggling to survive food insecurity, ill-health and poverty are now suffering malnourishment and starvation. 

We can't save the whole population, but if we can feed one child at a time and prevent them from starving tonight, it will be worthwhile.