Dekila Chungyalpa
Dekila is the founding director of 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 the executive producer for Sacred Wisdom Sacred Earth, a full-length documentary that unveils the deep connection of Wisconsin’s Native Tribes to the land and waters of the Great Lakes area. Dekila was recently named by Madison 365 as one of Wisconsin’s 22 Most Influential Asian American leaders.
She has over 25 years of experience in global conservation and climate solutions, with expertise in faith-led partnerships, biodiversity landscape and river basin strategy, community-based conservation, and climate resilience. In 2008, she began working with Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and nunneries to establish environmental projects under the auspices of His Holiness the 17th Karmapa. This catapulted her to create WWF Sacred Earth in 2009 to work with faith leaders and religious institutions in the Amazon, East Africa, Himalayas, Mekong, and the US, and to move to Yale to create the prototype for Loka in 2014.
In 2019, Dekila launched the Loka Initiative in partnership with Center for Healthy Minds and 7 other institutions at UW-Madison. Drawing upon her upbringing and Tibetan Buddhist tradition, Dekila integrates inner, community, and planetary resilience as a unified principle and creates contemplative and community wellbeing practices that embody this approach. She is originally from the Himalayas and belongs to the Bhutia community.
In-Person | PM Session A
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
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Facilitated By: Soumya Palreddy & Dekila Chungyalpa
Audience: Those 18+ organizing, leading, and caretaking on the ground for justice
We are living in a time of extraordinary stress—national, local, relational, environmental, and personal. For those organizing, leading, and caretaking on the ground for justice, the work to transform extractive and exploitative systems can often feel depleting, isolating, and eventually lead to burn out.
Presented by the Compassion Collective (Loka Initiative, Palreddy-Lowe Learning Lab, Center for Healthy Minds, and YWCA Madison), this session led by Dekila Chungyalpa and Soumya Palreddy invites changemakers, organizers, and caregivers to explore why creating containers for deepening inner, community, and ecological resilience must be intentionally embedded into the fabric of our social movements.
Grounded in the Deep Resilience framework developed by the Loka Initiative, this session asserts that abolishing and subverting harmful institutions and structures requires us to build intentional and supportive containers that heal and nurture ourselves, our community, and our environments. The Deep Resilience framework promotes a different model for self care; one that replenishes our inner resources through community care and compassion practices and re-rooting our interconnectedness with the Earth.
In this session, participants will:Explore why approaching self care through the lens of caring for a community and re-establishing our connection with the Earth is essential to moving towards liberation.
Engage in a dialogue on how to create containers for care in their own lives, organizations, and communities.
Directly experience 1-2 contemplative practices aimed at deepening inner, community, or planetary resilience.
Receive a resource kit with some curated practices, prompts, and tools to continue deepening resilience beyond the session.