To date our work in rural Sri Lanka has centered on partner schools—daily meals, supplies, connectivity, and programs chosen with school leadership. As we prepare to grow that footprint, we have invested heavily in the systems behind the work: a unified platform we call Foundation OS.
Foundation OS is not a separate product for sale. It is the operating backbone we built so the Weedagama Foundation can run programs with the same rigor as a well-managed organization—finance, compliance, school partnerships, and public reporting in one place.
Why we built it
Early support came from our founder and corporate matching while we proved the model in the field. Spreadsheets and ad hoc tools were enough for one school; they do not scale to many partners, many funding categories, and many donors who expect clear accounting.
We needed software that could grow with us: capture every expense before money moves, give schools a direct line to request support, and show foundation staff and board members accurate numbers without manual reconciliation every month.
What schools can do today
Partner schools use Foundation OS through the admin portal to participate in day-to-day operations—not only to receive support, but to document it:
- Funding requests — schools prepare and submit funding applications online, track review status, and see when an approved request becomes a budgeted project
- Expenses and invoices — project teams log purchases and invoices, attach receipts, and route items through approval before disbursement
- Cook payments and meal service — meal-day records and cook invoices tie back to project budgets so daily nutrition stays traceable
- Project KPIs — each school project carries live indicators—budget, spend, and activity—so staff and foundation managers share the same picture of progress
In-kind gifts and acknowledgments
Donated equipment and supplies follow their own path through the ledger. When in-kind gifts are earmarked for a school, foundation staff record the donation, disburse it to the correct project, and schools upload acknowledgments so donors and auditors can see that items reached the classroom.
Foundation-wide finance and governance
Behind the school-facing tools, Foundation OS connects to the full finance stack our board expects:
- Cash, check, and online gifts—including secure card checkout on our public donate page
- Operating accounts, reconciliation, and approval queues before funds leave the foundation
- Partner project budgets, carry-forward rules, and audit trails on every edit
- Public site content, news, and impact figures drawn from the same database—not duplicated slides
Operational costs during our early years were covered by our founder so project funds could focus on students. The platform we built now lets us demonstrate, line by line, how future support is requested, approved, and spent.
Ready to scale—deliberately
Foundation OS does not mean we will add partners overnight. We still expand one school and one program at a time, as we did when we began in 2023 and when we opened our pre-K pilot in Dampalla.
What changed is readiness: when a rural school is ready to partner, we no longer outgrow our tools mid-stream. Funding categories, expense policies, and reporting are already in the system. Our team can onboard a new partner, open projects, and maintain KPIs without rebuilding process from scratch.
What this means for supporters
If you give through corporate matching, online checkout, or offline pledge, your gift lands in the same ledger schools and auditors see. If you volunteer or follow our news, you are watching an organization that invested in infrastructure before asking for scale.
We are grateful to everyone who supported the field work while this platform was under construction—and to the school leaders who helped shape workflows by using early versions and telling us what was missing.
Questions about our programs or how we steward funds? Contact us through the website. The Weedagama Foundation is an IRS-approved 501(c)(3) charitable organization.