Murali Cup gets a head start: OYOB joins the Foundation of Goodness OYOB Pty Ltd. is a Melbourne based group of young real estate entrepreneurs who do not stop at wanting to develop your real estate portfolio. While they help you find a place to construct your dream home and Own Your Own Block, they also want to help build an entire community, by extending a hand to lift up whole communities trying to regain normalcy and rebuild their lives after Sri Lanka’s long and devastating civil war.
In true Sri Lankan fashion, their great passion for the game of cricket meant that they wanted to help support FoG’s Murali Harmony Cup, a cricket tournament which brings together 12 boy’s school teams and 8 ladies teams from around the island for a five day cricket tournament held in 5 venues in the North (Mankulam, Kilinochchi, Oddusuddan, Vavuniya and Jaffna) which seeks to develop rural cricket creating an avenue for potential young cricketers in the North to gain recognition and make their way to the national arena as well as to promote reconciliation and camaraderie between the youngsters from across Sri Lanka from different backgrounds who come together and form lifelong friendships. The tournament highlights the leadership qualities that lie within the young sportsmen while binding them together not only through team spirit, but also through a deeper understanding and empathy towards the rival team’s as well.
As dynamic and innovative thinkers, seeking solutions outside the norm, the OYOB team decided to organize a fundraiser in the form of the Festival of Cricket, Australia. What better way to raise funds to secure the future of cricket than through cricket itself?
The Festival of Cricket was designed to be a fun day in the sun for Sri Lankan ex-pats to live out their glory days, and remember all the school cricket tournaments they had attended as kids. 16 Sri Lankan schools were represented at this tournament and the teams of old-boys took to the field as though they had but left school last week. After a launch attended by Sri Lankan cricketing greats, Muthiah Muralidaran and Lasith Malinga, there was a great turn out on the 10th of March and the Old Royalists trounced the old boys’ team representing D. S. Senanayaka College.
It was a wonderful day which raised money for a wonderful cause, and proceeds from this event go towards procuring the longevity of the Murali Harmony Cup which will bring cricket, reconciliation and happiness to young children in the North who had no opportunity for such an experience during the long years of war. This tournament seeks to bring about understanding and reconciliation, and through their support OYOB have committed towards making a positive impact in the lives of many Sri Lankans.
It is not very often that we come across institutions of the OYOB’s caliber to who create something absolutely unique by way of promoting a novel concept such as the Festival of Cricket to unite Sri Lankan’s irrespective of their backgrounds, in Melbourne, which is so compatible to the philosophy of the Foundation of Goodness. The Foundation of Goodness would like to specially highlight the incredible effort of the OYOB team in action, namely; Jitto Arulampalam, Dhilharan & Aynkaran Sivaratnam, Bertram Daniel, Patrick Ng, Kosala Premaratne and Manoj Boteju.
"Sport has the power to change the world, it has the power to inspire, it has the power to unite... Sport can create hope where once there was only despair." - Nelson Mandela -
07th May 2014 
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