kapila wewegama

Kapila Wewegama serves as an independent management and training consultant/facilitator. He is currently providing training consultancy to the Corporation for National Service, Peace Corps and other non-profit organizations. His services to the Corporation for National Service include technical assistance and training to State Commissions on Volunteerism and Community Service and their sub-grantees, VISTA volunteers and eGrants applicants of the National Service Partner programs. He consults as a Peace Corps Staging Director and trains Peace Corps volunteers prior to departure for their assigned country. He has over fifteen years of training and management experience. Kapila served as the Associate Peace Corps Director (Director of Program & Training) with Peace Corps in Sri Lanka for eight years. He has designed and provided numerous cross-cultural and diversity trainings to organizations and participants over the last eighteen years.

Kapila teaches a course on cultural competence in community development, which is designed to enhance students' ability to effectively engage in and facilitate community development activities in a culturally diverse context. The main goal of his course is to challenge participants to take their learning beyond just an intellectual pursuit to an enhanced applicable cultural competence, so as to serve as effective development facilitators.

"As a community development facilitator, one of the frequent questions that I ask myself is, 'who is actually helping whose survival?' I, as many hundreds of thousands other community development facilitators, practitioners or whatever title they use, try to serve individuals, communities, nations or the world to overcome the dilemmas of underdevelopment, poverty, homelessness, and other social and human issues. But I can't help wondering whether those who are in poverty and other socially depriving situations are actually helping us with our own survival, as most of us are making a living in the name of those people's agony." - KW

Courses
MACD 5950 Topics in Community Development: Cultural Competence in Community Development