Hello everyone! It’s been quiet here in Dhasa, except for a few days in between when the England India test series happened—and thousands of brits flew down. We also had the 65th Tibetan uprising day to mark the 10th of March, 1959 when Tibetans rose against China’s illegal invasion of their homeland.
Here’s a photo from a recent protest that took place here, on the entire forced relocation of Tibetans in Dêgê County:
While the local cafés slowly open up after their extensive renovations post Losar, a fair bit of progress happened on our end.
As part of our expanded scope of work, we have been looking at the third pole region as a whole, instead of just the Indian Himalayas.
The idea is to think of Himalayan or third pole environmental law beyond borders, and gain crucial and credible insights from our neighborhood.
In this process, we’ve come across people doing some incredible work in this region. Some, like
are running newsletters reporting what is going on inside Myanmar often at personal great risk or some, such as Ikramuddin Kamil, drawing a picture of contemporary Afghan environmental issues that are extremely hard to come by.Naturally, we have also upped our outreach efforts to citizens/diaspora from Myanmar, Bangladesh, Tibet, East Turkestan, Bhutan, Nepal, Afghanistan and Pakistan—that together form the third pole (we also have some parts of Yunnan, Sichuan and Gansu, and arguably parts of Tajikistan. We’ll eventually get there).
Many experts have been gracious in sharing some of their insights with us. Our team is slowly becoming more representative of the larger third pole and South Asian region too!
Efforts to work alongside Tibetans and Uyghurs haven’t led to much and understandably so, considering that many have their families back home being surveilled by the Chinese. We have started collecting information from these regions, thanks to extensive work being done by diaspora led organizations such as the Uyghur Human Rights Project.
Having a team that is truly representative of the third pole would go such a long way when it comes to our stated goal of working for and from the third pole region.
International hiring has also meant that we have invested in making management better and putting in place stronger feedback mechanisms via our landing page for incoming staff:
We have also updated our “People” page after a long time, finally showing all the people that have been a part of our journey and those that are incoming!
Having worked on testimonials from staff and industry experts last year, we decided to double down on “social proof” by creating a dedicated “press kit” page and reaching out to journalists. It’s all a work in progress and leads don’t easily translate but we’re determined to move forward.
None of this could have happened without Notion, so highly highly recommend that if you’re a small business.
All of this is procedural stuff, really. The boring, back end stuff, that really pushes the ball forward, we believe. Combined, these efforts and more have helped us in raising some funds, though nearly not enough to undertake field visits and pay staff better.
Our hope is that things will compound and bring in more funds and traction. At the same time, the surrounding mountains have taught us that nothing lasts forever, so all we can hope for is to do our bit.
Right now, that bit is to accurately represent the state of the third pole environment, from the third pole.
That’s it for this edition. We’re going to leave you with another aesthetic photograph from sleepy Dharamshala!
Happy spring!
Himalayan Advocacy Center
Postscript:
As you may know, we are a small non profit in the environment + law space located in the Indian Himalayas. We are completely bootstrapped! This means no foreign funding and no fancy headquarters - just a small community - of which you all are an integral part - in the long run we hope!
What’s more - we, at the Center, are determined to localise efforts for the planet, without compromising on the best that the law has to offer. If you have the means, and want to support a committed local undertaking, please do consider contributing to our corpus. We hope to pleasantly surprise you with detailed information on where you money has been spent!