Padmi Liyanage studied for four years at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Colombo, Sri Lanka, and successfully graduated in 1996 with a Bachelor of Social Sciences (BSc.), Estate Management & Valuation.

In Germany, she successfully completed her studies in 2022 as Bachelor of Arts Social Work (B.A.) Hochschule Esslingen. Faculty of Social Work, Education and Nursing with state recognition successfully completed.

The elective areas of study were: Gender Reflexive Social Work and Work with People with Disabilities and the project was related to “Social Work in the EU – Context-System Comparison, Empirical Social Research”. The subject of the project was the investigation of the field of action sex work in the Netherlands and Germany. The bachelor thesis dealt with social work in the context of flight.

She completed her practical semester at the Arbeitsgemeinschaft für die eine Welt (AGDW e.V.), Kirchheimerstraße Community Shelter, Stuttgart.

In her home country in Sri Lanka, she worked for almost 12 years in the field of social services as a peace and human rights activist, actively promoting the human rights of minorities. In 1998, she was one of the co-founders of the Center for Community Dialogue & Communication (PRASANNI), an NGO working towards a political solution to the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka and against human rights violations. On the ground, she led political awareness projects as a program coordinator and was able to celebrate impressive successes of this work. Through these experiences, peacebuilding and advocacy for human rights have become a matter close to her heart.

In 2002, she co-founded the non-governmental organization Future Peace Youth Network. In this organization, she served as national coordinator for Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim youth affected by war and unemployment. She gained a lot of experience in dealing with people from multi-ethnic cultural backgrounds. Thereby she learned an adequate way of dealing with young people in special stressful situations in order to support them in these difficult situations. Since 2010 she is a member of the association “International Network for Sri Lanka’s Democracy e.V.”, in Germany, which supports the civil society in Sri Lanka to fight against racism and human rights violations of minorities. Since 2014 she has been working as a social worker in different areas of youth welfare at the Youth Welfare Office, in the fields of work with unaccompanied minor refugee children and young people, with children and young people in need of help in the residential groups and with families and children in need of help.

Working with children, young people and adults from different cultures gives her great pleasure. Personal commitment to social democracy, freedom, justice and solidarity plays a very important role in her life.