10 Years! Video Message from Lhadon

This month, Tibet Action Institute turns 10! We’ve made a short video to tell the story of our beginnings and to ask for your continued support as we start our second decade of using technology and nonviolent action to strengthen the Tibetan people’s struggle for freedom.

It’s hard to believe 10 years have passed since Tibet Action’s co-founder and Director of Technology, Nathan Freitas and I, with the support of a group of seasoned Tibet activists, officially started the Institute. Since 2009 we have built a stronger, more strategic and resilient movement – both inside Tibet and in exile. We’ve done this by seizing on the incredible opportunities offered by revolutionary advances in communications technology and supporting the new generation of freedom fighters inducted into the resistance since the 2008 Tibetan uprising.

Most of our work over the past decade has taken place outside the spotlight, for important reasons. But we have made groundbreaking progress, including:

• Defending Tibetans against countless online attacks from Beijing and transforming the digital security landscape of the Tibetan freedom movement through broad-scale public awareness campaigns
• Increasing the strategic capacity of the movement by graduating 124 exceptional young Tibetan leaders from our Lhakar Academy – Tibetan School for Leadership & Change, training them on advanced theories of nonviolent action, movement leadership, and the Chinese political environment
• Training over 2,000 frontline activists on how to use strategic nonviolence and technology to make change for Tibet
• Creating innovative education programs that make abstract concepts of digital security accessible to Tibetans everywhere through dozens of videos viewed over 200,000 times
• Creating more than 200 educational materials in Tibetan and English about how strategic organizing can and has worked in extremely repressive contexts, accessed by tens of thousands of people
• Pioneering efforts in the use of encrypted, private and censorship-resistant mobile communications for human rights trainings, organizing and data gathering

We have built an incredible team of Tibetans and allies who are expert technologists, strategists and campaigners committed to advancing the struggle. Through our network of highly skilled and specialized change-makers, we will continue to work for the liberation of Tibet, one of the last remaining colonies in the world.

We will not stop until this goal is achieved.

Thank you and thuk je che!