As founder and president, Raj oversees Newo’s development, education programs and charitable projects. He is also the co-founder of the Sunrise Farm Cooperative and the Spirit of the Land Foundation.

life story so far

Rajan Rathnavalu reflects back on his life, seated in the bright living room of the house in which he grew up.

It’s a fairly typical Camrose dwelling, with a view out over roofs and treetops, but for Raj there’s an ever-present acknowledgement such comfort is not the norm.

His parents,Margaret (who grew up near New Norway) and Lawrence, met and married in Zambia. They brought him to Canada aged three, and lived and taught in the northern Alberta reservation of Wabasca-Desmarais for a few years before moving to Camrose. The vast gap in wealth and lifestyle was apparent to Raj, even as a young child.

“Just seeing the relative affluence of what a ‘normal’ Canadian life is when compared with so many other humans in this world,” Raj reflects, “one equation that stood out for me was, if you’re given so much in a world of unequal footing, then a person’s primary task is to give back and to share.”

His parents encouraged him to develop this sense of understanding and generosity. A pivotal early experience involved hearing the environmentalist and human rights advocate Thom Henley speak at a conference to which Margaret took Raj when he was in junior high. Henley described the plight of the Penan peoples and the Borneo rainforest, and how every loss of a Penan elder “was like a library of knowledge burning down,” lost along with the forest. Raj wondered “how it was possible for us to knowingly destroy such beautiful ecosystems, so rare and precious.”

When he graduated highschool, Raj took two years to explore the world and spent time in Africa and South America, including four months in the Amazon Basin living with a group of early contact Indigenous peoples. His travels brought him to a deeper appreciation of the connection between all humans, and grounded him in the reality of the challenges facing Indigenous peoples whose lands are under threat.

“It seems like the modern economy has great difficulty listening to the wisdom of the forest, and of the elders and people who live in such places, so I entered university with a vision to transform all that.”

turning points

Raj began a degree in economics at McGill University in Montreal, anticipating that he would learn how to live out the responsibilities his parents had instilled in him, but he “quickly came to the conclusion that the purpose of university wasn’t to enable transformation, but to facilitate management of status quo.”

It was a calculated process of acculturation, and what struck him was the absence of compassion and connection to other people and places. He finished the year, and spent another at Augustana University College (now U of A Augustana Campus), but determined he couldn’t learn what he needed at an academic institution.

“The burden of completing assignments and preparing for exams precluded an ability to synthesize what you had learned and be changed by it,” he says. “When I left university, I suppose I went looking for what I would consider real teachers: elders who could show us ways to live in harmony with one another and access and cultivate the deeper qualities of what it means to be human.”

He spent the next 11 years immersed in a contemplative Buddhist tradition, finding the life meaningful, but ultimately one of the most challenging parts of his journey.

“I suppose one way of telling it is I came to encounter my own limitations, and so ended up leaving that life and coming back home.”

core values

“When I came home I was pretty broken. I would do the same meditation every day and then walk around Mirror Lake. And over time, I came to really recognise, as humble as Mirror Lake is, it has a healing quality — all nature does — and the lake took on a power I hadn’t been able to recognise before, and played a significant role in piecing myself back together.”

A couple of years later, he decided to return to school at Augustana, and this time found he had the capacity to be proactive in creating the kind of study he wanted to do. Along with Prof. Dittmar Mundel, he developed the Spirit of the Land Class out of a desire to open a space where students could connect with the people and places around them.

“If we can help people to recognise the healing capacity of the elements around us, we wouldn’t be so prone to destroying them,” he says.

Spirit of the Land ran for nine years, and began to morph into Newo, a non-profit social enterprise that would act as a “graduate program” for SotL, a place to put ideas into practice in the so-called “real world.”

“I’d observed students would have a transformative experience in Spirit of the Land, graduate, and then not be able to translate that into their working life. And I’ve tried to follow the notion that if you don’t like something, then take it on yourself to change it.”

The priority all along has been to build a business based on care and empathy rather than material accumulation, and without too much attachment to the idea of success; if Newo failed, it could “at least be good compost for future experiments and developments.”

One of Raj’s great hopes is to begin to show reconciliation in action within the organization.

“Generally, the things that we’re least good at are the sources of our greatest growth. I think that is the same for Canada,” he says. “My family incorporates settlers, newcomers and First Peoples, so I hope Newo can serve as a model for what society might look like when we incorporate the gifts of all peoples.”

rooted in people or place

Raj finds his roots in the loving relationships he’s been surrounded by his whole life, but in the year he is turning 50, the spiritual contemplation of mortality, “the recognition we are brief sojourners on this Earth,” is uppermost in his mind.

“Increasingly these days I’m tuning into the rootedness of my deeper spirit, which carries me from lifetime to lifetime,” he says. “I’ve been enormously grateful to have lived in places where I’ve experienced…an ecosystem of freedom that has given me the opportunity to live a spiritual life, and to encounter teachers who have offered such profound and priceless wisdom.”

Absent the ability to live a spiritual life, to have “access to something beyond,” days would be spent jumping through empty hoops, meeting meaningless milestones.

“That ‘beyond’ is what animates all of this,” he says. “I think with that puzzle piece, life in Canada could make so much more sense. We are materially relatively very wealthy, but we don’t know what to do with that wealth, so we just make more or strive for more…I suppose a part of me laments what could be for Canada, and yet is not.”

But through Newo, he is living out the hope that it can be.