Dekila Chungyalpa
Dekila Chungyalpa is the founding director of the Loka Initiative, an award-winning capacity building and outreach platform at the University of Wisconsin – Madison for faith leaders and culture keepers of Indigenous traditions working on environmental and climate issues. She is an experienced environmental program director, with over 25 years of experience in designing and implementing global conservation and climate strategies and projects. Known as an innovator in the environmental field, Dekila has expertise in faith-led environmental and climate partnerships, biodiversity landscape and river basin strategy design, and community-based conservation.
In 2008, she helped establish Khoryug, an association of over 50 Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and nunneries implementing environmental projects across the Himalayas under the auspices of His Holiness the 17th Karmapa. In 2009, Dekila founded and led WWF Sacred Earth, a 5-year pilot program at the World Wildlife Fund that built partnerships with faith leaders and religious institutions towards conservation and climate results in the Amazon, East Africa, Himalayas, Mekong, and the United States, for which she received the prestigious Yale McCluskey Award. Dekila moved to Yale School of Environment in 2014 and spent the next three years designing and testing the prototype of Loka in collaboration with many faith and Indigenous leaders.
Dekila is originally from the Himalayan state of Sikkim in India and is of Bhutia origin. She is the daughter of the late Tsunma Dechen Zangmo, a Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher. She is a sought after public speaker and has spoken at the American Museum of Natural History, Bioneers, Harvard, Mind and Life, National Geographic, Stanford, and Yale, and sits on the board or advisory committee for several organizations including Green The Church, the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, Midwest Environmental Advocates, and the Society of Conservation Biology’s Religion and Conservation Working Group. You can find her latest essays at the Rubin Museum’s Spiral magazine: One Refuge One Planet and at Psychology Today: 5 Things to Alleviate Eco-Anxiety and Build Resilience.
Links: www.lokainitiative.org/ https://centerhealthyminds.org/programs/loka-initiative
DC social media: www.instagram.com/dchungyalpa/ https://bsky.app/profile/dchungyalpa.bsky.social
Loka social media: www.instagram.com/loka.initiative/ https://bsky.app/profile/lokainitiative.bsky.social
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