The Dilmah Christmas fundraiser

One of our friends, Ryan Batelaan, owns a hotel in Sri Lanka with her husband Roshan. Their team and family hand out food packages to local families to survive the current economic crisis. We share our abundance with them so they can feed families. Are you in?

“Your kindness is giving hope to those who think they are all alone in this world"

Join in and let kindness ripple;

There are 3 ways to support this initative;

1. Join our warehouse sale at our Dilmah Europe office.

We have quite some short shelflife stock in abundance. We invite everyone to come fill your shoppers with tea and spread kindness in your own communities. Tea and Christmas bread will be served. Choose from the abundance and choose how much you donate.

• When: December 20th 2022 between 15:00 and 17:30
• Where: Dilmah office at Postjesweg 1 in Amsterdam.
• Who: you, and your friends, family and other nice people.

2. Buy generously through our webshop this week.

We donate 15% from all tea sales from today until Christmas.

3. Share this initiative

Bring it on to your folks, share this story via your social network (online & offline). Transform your pity feeling into action and direct results.

100% of the proceeds help to feed families in need

Please note that 100% of the proceeds of this fundraiser are spent on food, no overhead. Ryan and her team are voluntarily rolling up their sleeves for this.

The total amount of the donations will be remitted to Sri Lanka on 22 December so that Christmas packages can be distributed o the Sri Lankan families who need it the most. We will announce the result via our social channels on the 23rd of december.

From every 30 Euros we collect one foodpackage can be put together, to feed a family of four with about two weeks. A food package consists of a bag of rice, a bottle of oil, vegetables, etc. Distribution of the packages will be done via Ryan's local network, in and around Matara.

Join us!

Why is this charity urgently needed?

Sri Lanka is the heart of Dilmah. Most of our Dilmah family lives in Sri Lanka, and it is also where our tea comes from. Due to the economic crisis in Sri Lanka, many people are under pressure, so much so that many families no longer have money to buy food. We want to turn our concerns about this humanitarian crisis into action.

We have met Ryan Batelaan in Amsterdam. She works for Google but she also runs the hotel the Seascape in Matara with her Sri Lankan husband Roshan. She visits Sri Lanka regularly and has many family, friends and colleagues there. Right at the outbreak of the crisis, Ryan and her husband started distributing food packs to locals. Together with Ryan, we want to offer Christmas packages with food for families. From the Netherlands, she coordinates donations that go directly to her organisation in Sri Lanka, 100% of which are spent on the goal of providing families with food for a short period of time.

Ryan's connection to Sri Lanka

More than 25 years ago, Ryan worked for a hotel chain where she spent a few years in Sri Lanka. There she met Roshan, a colleague, whom she eventually married. Together they bought a piece of land in Matara, by the sea in southern Sri Lanka, with the intention of building their home. This became the Seascape in 2016, where Ryan is in Sri Lanka every year for the high season.

So she is very close to the crisis in Sri Lanka and it hit her too much to do nothing about it. Earlier this year, she started a temporary action in which she raised money to buy food from in Sri Lanka for the families in her nearby area who she knew were struggling very hard. She collected the money and it ended up with her sisters-in-law (who also work at the Seascape), who put together the packets with that money and distributed them. In the end, she was responsible for 250 parcels for Sri Lankan families.

However, Ryan does not see her fundraiser as an ongoing charity. On this, she says: "I deliberately chose not to start a foundation because I just really want it to be something temporary."

Sri Lanka in crisis

Sri Lanka is located in south-east Asia, close to India. During the corona pandemic, the country's economy came to a virtual standstill. The tourism sector completely collapsed, which had major effects on the economy, which was already unstable due to the closed economy. The year before the pandemic broke out, the economy was also in danger. There had been a number of bombings, which meant the tourism sector was already at a standstill by then.

Food shortages in families

As prices rise due to inflation and groceries became up to three times more expensive, very many people are now unable to afford their food. Most families are unable to afford more than one meal a day, or sometimes nothing at all, still today. We're hoping the economy will soon be sustainably restored and the inflation on primary needs curbed in order to make food affordable again for the common people. Until then, the people of Sri Lanka depend on emergency aid.