Thirty years of standing with, not standing over.

Community Development Foundation was founded on January 29, 1993, in Kollankuttigama, a small village in Anuradhapura District. Seventeen unemployed young people, under the leadership of S.H. Razik, came together to respond to the displacement rural communities were facing as they lost access to land and water.

The organization was soon re-founded under a name that could unite Sinhala, Muslim, and Tamil communities alike — a deliberate choice that continues to shape how CDF works today, across ethnic and religious lines rather than within them.

On July 29, 1995, CDF was formally registered under the Voluntary Social Service Organizations Registration Act, and separately registered as an environmental organization under the Central Environmental Authority — giving the organization the legal standing to grow beyond a single village initiative.

Like many grassroots organizations, CDF's activity slowed considerably between 2012 and 2022. Rather than treat that as a chapter to leave out, we see it as part of the honest story — and what came after it is the part we're proudest of. Beginning in 2023, a new generation of leadership rebuilt CDF from the ground up, joining the Land & Agrarian Reform program and re-establishing a network of ecological agricultural producer collectives across the district.

Today, CDF works alongside eleven producer collectives, delivers programs spanning education, health, environment, and human rights, and was formally re-registered with the Anuradhapura District Secretariat on January 30, 2026 — marking a new chapter built on three decades of lessons learned.