Our Story

The family invited Matt for food to express their gratitude.  Spending time in the shanty town and witnessing the startling poverty and suffering, he found himself deeply affected. The children were in rags, noses and eyes weeping due to viruses and sores on their bodies caused through infection. Packs of diseased, starving dogs ran in and out of shelters without doors. Many once proud parents had descended into alcoholism and families were splintered. In the midst of this, Matt found himself witness to profound humility and generosity from the family who now offered him food.

That night, walking back up the hill from the shanty town towards the lights of the guesthouses above, it struck him that he had to help. He immediately found a phone and called two friends in the UK – Jason Bardell and Terry Easton. That night the three of them made a strong commitment to housing Ramesh and his family and immediately set about raising money.

The young friends had all at some time experienced significant trauma and suffering in their lives and had been deeply grateful for the kindness and compassion they had received from others on their road to recovery. This shared experience of suffering and belief in the power of such kindness and compassion acted as a fuel for the work involved in what soon became Mandala Trust.

Ramesh and his family were housed a year later and are now settled. The children remained healthy and attended a local school – and are now themselves adults – some with their own children. The growing group of people involved in Mandala Trust now found themselves with a registered charity on their hands and set about identifying new projects to become involved with. We were able to build new friendships with local grassroots organisations, initially in India and then farther afield. Mandala Trust has now supported meaningful work on the ground in over twenty countries across four continents.  See: Our Projects

Operation Kindness

As we grew ever larger, Operation Kindness was initiated by Mandala Trust in 2014 in order to promote the ethic of kindness which has always inspired and fueled our work. Operation Kindness was a global family of activists, communities and grassroots campaigns. Its purpose was to imagine, articulate, implement and actualise alternatives to neoliberal globalisation based upon kindness, altruism and love. 

Choosing kindness and love as a frame of reference, Operation Kindness activists, local groups and country groups expressed their core aims and principles in a variety of ways, mirroring the diversity of the communities they grew within – in Turkey organising student activist groups, in Uganda organising alter-globalisation dialogue and policy formation, in northern Europe taking direct action against corporate trade deals and the environmental crisis, and in Brazil organising awareness-raising social media campaigns.

Between 2014 and 2020, Mandala Trust funded and supported the work of a number of Operation Kindness groups internationally, including:

• In Uganda, support and training for local young people and students from disadvantaged backgrounds and an innovative youth cooperative — ‘The Kampala Kindness Cooperative’. The OK Uganda activists also organised regular outreach to the local community, engaging in acts of solidarity including neighbourhood clean-ups.

• In Jordan, OK activists organised a refugee solidarity group supporting children fleeing conflict in Iraq and Syria.

• In Tecax, Yucatan, Mexico, OK activists organised into a ‘Colectiva Mujeres’, through which local women engaged in a range of community mobilisations which benefited children such as community garden projects, breakfast clubs for school children and mother and child yoga groups.

• OK activists from South Sudan, themselves refugees, facilitated youth peace dialogues as well as organising refugee solidarity groups in support of those displaced by the conflict in the country.

• OK Zimbabwe activists provided educational support for children from poorer rural areas and ran prison groups for adolescent inmates.

International Advisory Group

For a number of years, our International Advisory Group (IAG) consisted of representatives of some of the organisations which had previously partnered with, or received support from, Mandala Trust. The IAG supported the Board of Trustees by adopting a shared learning approach which focused on the strategy, values and practices of Mandala Trust and how we work for change. This process aimed to provide a grassroots perspective from the diversity of groups and communities with which Mandala Trust supports and partners, predominantly in the Global South – locating this shared learning beyond the boundaries of the then UK-based Board of Trustees.

The IAG further aimed to deepen the efforts of Mandala Trust to develop our approach through a critical reflection on our charitable activities – in turn leading to new ideas and perspectives which inspired new plans and enhanced practices.  So successful was this approach that it has now been integrated into the board of trustees itself, with former IAG members - Nesreen Khashman and Skhumbuzo Mlibeni - now trustees, continuing to bring this invaluable experience to the heart of the charity’s governance and activities.

A new home in Ireland

After being a registered charity in the UK for over twenty years, in 2025 the UK organisation wound its activities down and a new Irish-based Mandala Trust was officially registered with the Irish Charity Regulator.  Now, with our new Irish base, we continue to work with our friends across the world to – as our tagline states: cultivate communities of care for children worldwide.  We remain a small organisation by charity standards, supported by a network of (extra)ordinary individuals from all walks of life, showing spontaneous compassion in their efforts to help others across the world that they may never meet but still feel a deep connection with.