- Boston Business Journal 40 Under 40 nominee Asini Wijewardane on business and passion
A Sri Lankan abroad, Asini Wijewardane received a special accolade last month when she was named one of the Boston Business Journal’s top 40 business people under 40. The Boston Business Journal is one of America’s most respected business publications and has published this list of 40 top business people each year for over 24 years.
Asini was recognised by the Boston Business Journal for her work as a social entrepreneur and businessperson. Her current venture, Uwill, of which she is Director, is a teletherapy company that partners with colleges and universities across the US. Students from Uwill’s partner colleges get to use Uwill to access free counselling and wellness services.
Brunch reached out to Asini for a chat on this recent milestone as well as to learn more about her work and what drives her and how her work with Uwill is pushing boundaries and stands to change how we view counselling and wellness services.
Flying Sri Lanka’s flag high
We started our chat with how it feels to have been named one of Boston Business Journal’s 40 Under 40, and Asini shared that it had been an incredibly heartening milestone, both for her on a personal level, and because of what she as a businesswoman of colour represented in the larger scheme of things.
Normally not one to talk about or pursue accolades (she’s more in favour of doing the work versus putting herself forward for recognition), Asini hadn’t initially intended on sharing the news about her recent achievement. However, a request from someone on LinkedIn about being able to share the news with their daughter changed Asini’s mind, because, while Asini might have felt like it wasn’t a great achievement or that she may not wholly deserve it, the fact remains that in most lists of this nature, the people nominated tend to be of the same race, gender, background, or age, which makes it important from a diversity viewpoint to speak about your achievements and show other young South Asians, especially women, that they are represented in platforms that measure success.
“I feel really great to have been nominated, especially given that I’ve only been in the US for a few years now,” Asini said, adding that part of why it was important to speak about the nomination was to show that “to be established in business doesn’t mean that you have to look a certain way, and that’s one of the things that made me happy”.
Asini noted that the Boston Business Journal had done a great job in terms of gender balance and diversity when compiling its top 40 Under 40 list, but given that business tends to be, or is seen as, a male-dominated space with relatively few men and women of colour, it was doubly special for Asini, being in the minority, to be included in such a prestigious list.
Building her own brand of social entrepreneurship
Asini grew up between Sri Lanka and the UK. She is, in fact, a proud alum of Asian International School (AIS), which had been where she got her first taste of social impact work, by setting up societies like Interfaith and being involved in extracurricular activities. She had begun her higher education in Sri Lanka before going on to complete her degree (her undergrad was in Business and Law) in the UK before entering the UK’s non-profit space to work in healthcare improvement and cancer support and at research organisations and working with the Department of Health to improve services in hospitals and working at the grassroots level to develop communities.
Asini had also worked in Sri Lanka for a time as an adult, working at Stax and Chitrasena Dance Foundation, organisations that she credits for providing her with amazing experiences and close colleagues she is still in touch with and learning from.
“I believe my drive to make a social impact is probably rooted in my foundations and life in Sri Lanka,” Asini shared. “For example, I know Sri Lanka has one of the highest rates of volunteerism in the world, and this drive to help others is probably what most of us Sri Lankans have intuitively. So my foundations and family definitely influenced this drive in me. At my core, I want to make an impact, and your core is just that; your core, it’s not about what sector you’re part of but your mission.”
With her keen sense of social entrepreneurship well and truly instilled, Asini pursued her MBA at Babson College, with a focus on social entrepreneurship – building businesses that are not just for profit but also about social impact – and it was this that got her into the social innovation space and eventually led her to Uwill. Before Uwill, Asini set up her own e-counselling entity, to connect people with therapists at a time when mental health and wellbeing was becoming more and more important to people of all ages and from all walks of life.
Uwill: a unique telecounselling proposition
Uwill, Asini’s current venture, was founded in 2019 by Michael London, also an alumnus of Babson College who has worked in higher education for over 20 years. The idea was born after discussions with college presidents about the biggest challenges their student bodies were facing at the time, with mental health being a chief issue raised. “Counsellors couldn’t cope and there were waiting lists of 30 days or more,” Asini shared, explaining the landscape before Uwill’s arrival, “And 64% of college presidents said it was one of the driving issues impacting student health, and off the back of those discussions, Uwill was set up.”
More education tech than education, Uwill is a technological platform where universities can sign up to the Uwill platform and through partnering with the platform, each university’s students get a fixed number of virtual sessions for free with qualified counsellors. “All the university has to do is contact us to get access to the service and to our counsellors,” Asini explained, adding: “We work with universities across the US and the platform can be accessed from anywhere in the world.”
Uwill is transforming its field of mental health services, because in the space of mental health within university populations, it uses technology to change the pace and make accessing mental health services a much easier, more equitable, and more private process. “It really is changing things,” Asini noted. “We see thousands of students accessing our platform every time a new college starts working with us. We’re giving access to mental health services to all these students who couldn’t have that same level of access before. We also receive anonymous feedback that shows how they wouldn’t have been able to access a therapist or counsellor without the tools that Uwill provides. We provide tools that help these students get access to tools to get through some of their toughest times and it’s amazing to be able to really add value in that way.”
Sharing her thoughts on how telecounselling could fit into the Sri Lankan context, Asini shared that it was certainly applicable. “The pandemic has made people more comfortable with teleconsultation. For many, it was the only way to access non-urgent care for a period of time. People who would never have thought a Zoom call would be an effective way to have a consultation have adapted, and with that, there’s a level of comfort. I saw therapists at the height of the pandemic say teleconsultation would not last, but now there are therapists giving up their physical offices because there’s not a big difference and many people are more comfortable digitally,” Asini said.
There is still some way to go though, Asini shared, not just in that meeting face-to-face often provides patients a stronger sense of priority and safety, but in terms of how infrastructure needs to adapt for telecounselling to truly be able to take hold. “There needs to be a lot of digital access and penetration. The most important thing with healthcare is that it needs to be accessible. If we’re able to set up infrastructure and processes, whether in part of or as whole systems where it is possible to do consultations physically and virtually, it needs to be accessible on a mass level and there also needs to be data to do it across the board and not in a bubble. Sri Lanka is making massive improvements and its healthcare is very advanced and of the same quality as anywhere else in the world. Everywhere in the world people are struggling with accessible healthcare, even in America and equivalent places. Sri Lanka is not in isolation, but can learn from what is working and not working in other places and do it quicker.”
Speaking about her hopes for the future, Asini shared that she hoped to develop and grow Uwill to achieve its maximum potential, calling her work with Uwill her ‘ikigai’ – a Japanese concept that means your ‘reason for being’ – the perfect blend between work, passion, and purpose.
In the longer term, Asini said she wanted to set up an organisation where she could use her skills to help and support social organisations and arts organisations in South Asia and Sri Lanka. “There are so many great organisations in Sri Lanka and across South Asia that do such great work and make such an impact, and what I’ve learned from setting up organisations is how to inject fuel to maximise that impact.”
