Patrick Mendis - Early Years in Sri Lanka and Minnesota

Early Years in Sri Lanka and Minnesota

Patrick Mendis was born in the medieval capital of Polonnaruwa in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and grew up in Minnesota, USA. He was a Boy Scout, a Sarvodaya volunteer, a Police Cadets sergeant, and a commander of the Army Cadets Corps of Sri Lanka. Major General Milinda Peiris, the vice chancellor of the General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University (KDU), presented Professor Mendis the KDU Appreciation Award recognizing his contribution to Sri Lanka. He has also received the UNESCO Award sponsored by the United Nations Association of Sri Lanka. At Sarvodaya, Mendis worked with his mentor, A. T. Ariyaratne, the "Gandhi of Sri Lanka" and founder of Sarvodaya and later established a number of tsunami scholarships and the Sarvodaya Peace Prize. For his contributions to his native country, Mendis is recognized with the Sarvodaya International Peace Award and the Sri Lanka Foundation's Outstanding Leadership Award for International Diplomacy (in Los Angeles, California, USA).

At the age of 18, he won one of the nine AFS scholarships among over 100,000 applicants in Sri Lanka and attended American high school in Perham, Minnesota. At the end of his graduation in 1979, Mendis traveled by bus to Washington, D.C., where he met President Jimmy Carter's Vice President Walter Mondale (D-Minnesota) and U.S. Senator Rudy Boschwitz (R-Minnesota), who have been friends and supporters of Mendis all these years. After receiving his American diploma from Perham High School in Minnesota, he returned to the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, where Mendis endowed two annual scholarships in leadership and management studies in 1993. Mendis served as the vice president of the World University Service, the president of the University Sports Council, and a member of the University’s badminton, athletic, and swimming teams for which he won the University Colours. He earned his BS in business administration and economics (First Class Honours) before he returned to the United States on scholarship for graduate studies at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

In Minnesota, he worked in the Minnesota House of Representatives with the parliamentarian and chief clerk of the Minnesota House of Representatives Edward A. Burdick. During these years, Mendis studied under the late NATO Ambassador Harlan Cleveland, the founding dean of the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs and served as his special assistant when Cleveland became the president of the World Academy of Art and Science.

After earning his PhD in Geography/Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota in 1989, Mendis served as a Lecturer in International Relations and a Visiting Scholar in Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota from 1990 to 1997. During his tenure, Mendis worked with the late Regents Professor Vernon Ruttan and authored a book, Human Environment and Spatial Relations in Agricultural Production and four Staff Papers published by the University of Minnesota's Department of Applied Economics.

Alumnus of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Mendis raised fund for a number of tsunami projects in Sri Lanka in working with the Embassy of Sri Lanka and the Harvard University Club of Washington, D.C. He has established a range of tsunami scholarships, a micro-loan program, and a peace prize in Sri Lanka in collaboration with the Calvert Foundation in Maryland, USA.