Kavindya Thennakoon ’19, building a brighter world

She came to Wellesley from Sri Lanka, where she founded Without Borders, a nonprofit that turns unused rural spaces into IdeaLabs—community hubs offering education, employment, and entrepreneurial opportunities. While at Wellesley, she interned at Ogilvy & Mather, spent her junior year at the University of Oxford, and served as a civic entertainment researcher at MIT’s Media Lab. Kavi is the co-founder of Tilli, a platform for interactive games and activities to help teach social-emotional skills to kids, and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in developmental and psychological sciences at Stanford Graduate School of Education. The kicker is that she applied to Wellesley after meeting an alumna at the UN Youth Advisory Panel.