Monday marked the start of a two-week visit by Dr. A. T. Ariyaratne, the leader of a South Asian grass-roots movement for peace and development that reaches out to 16,000 villages in Sri Lanka to help them become more self-reliant.Ariyartatne, brought to Brandeis by the program in Sustainable International Development at The Heller School for Social Policy and Management, will be here until Oct. 31. During this time, he will offer a seminar for students and lead sessions during lunches and dinners for students and faculty.

"My speciality is development from grass-roots up, development with people's self-reliance and in participation," Ariyaratne said.

In 1958, he founded the Sarvodaya Shramandana Movement when he brought a group of upper-caste high school students to a poor village to help rebuild it. One village grew to be several villages, and eventually became a network of 16,000 villages-half the number of villages in Sri Lanka, according to Ariyaratne. Sarvodaya is now Sri Lanka's largest Non-Governmental Organization.

These efforts from the bottom up are crucial, Ariyaratne said, because governments, inter-governmental organizations and large financial institutions like the World Bank have taken "macro approaches ... to eradicate poverty," but have failed. "We have not succeeded," he said. "Nowhere. We have really aggravated the situation."

"So ours have been micro approaches," Ariyaratne said. "For example, we get the people themselves to suffer, to get themselves organized." He tries to help people "rediscover their ancient values" and remember the "days when they were not poor and powerless." By rediscovering this value system, he said, the villages can organize themselves and re-enter "regular society." This, he said, "is a society that is deciding what to do and how to do things."

The movement helps communities develop in six main spheres: spiritual, moral, cultural, social, economic and political. "In all these six sectors, [villages] have demonstrated that when given freedom, they can improve their own living conditions," Ariyaratne said. "It has proved to be a successful venture. That's why the entire world community is looking into it."

Sarvodaya responded to last December's tsunami by implementing its "5 R program": relief, rehabilitation, reconciliation, reconstruction and reawakening. The United Nations presented the organization with the Habitat Scroll award this month in Jakarta. According to the U.N. Habitat Web site, Sarvodaya had opened a national operations center only hours after the tsunami hit, and raised half a million dollars of aid in the three months that followed.

Ariyaratne said he was inspired by his parents, the Buddha, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.