OUR JOURNEY BUILDING ROKPA
The Heartfelt Call to Serve Our Community
In the fall of 2022 as we separately prepared to slip back into our mundane school routines, our lives took an unexpected turn. Choyang, Dekyi, and Chosang reached out to us, and suddenly, our paths converged towards a shared purpose – to carry forward the mission of Rokpa Mentorship. Our names are Jinpa, Tseyang, and Dadak and our journey leading Rokpa began with this heartfelt call to serve our community.
When we had our first zoom meeting together, fresh-faced and wide-eyed, we realized that although we came from differing backgrounds, we were raised quite similarly. The three of us spent our formative years in New York City – a place where towering skyscrapers stand in lieu of the snow-capped mountains of Tibet. We were raised to value service, to put our community at the forefront of all the work we do, and dream big because our brothers and sisters in Tibet could not. We felt that Rokpa Mentorship when solely defined by its college access program limited the scope of its potential. Rokpa (a symbolic name change) could become a beacon of hope and a catalyst for change in the lives of many Tibetan youth in exile. And we were determined to make this happen.
Our First Endeavor: The Networking Conference
Armed with big dreams and a firm resolve, we set out on this journey to see our vision come to life. Leveraging our personal and professional networks, we recruited Tibetan college students across the country who believed in our mission as much as we did. We collectively decided we could conduct specialized programming and service our community best if we divided ourselves into four teams: Mentorship, Community Enrichment, Communications, and Operations. Mentorship provided educational support for Tibetan youth and ran our flagship program: Rokpa Scholars. Community Enrichment spearheaded initiatives that focused on cultural and political engagement, creating spaces and equipping youth with the knowledge to navigate their unique exilic experience. Communications worked behind the scenes, conducting outreach through digital platforms to service as many Tibetans as possible and exploring ways in which we could leverage social media to engage our community. Operations took care of our organizational health, managing our (meager) finances and logistical affairs. Rokpa was no longer just an aspiration; twelve people became its driving force and the embodiment of our commitment to uplift Tibetan youth.
Freshly formed and still relative strangers to one another, we set our sights on our biggest endeavor yet— the first ever Tibetan Networking Conference. The path was strenuous, marked by countless spreadsheets, endless meetings that would somehow always extend more than its allotted time, and a tenacious effort to not just make it happen, but to make it exceptionally meaningful. We wanted the conference to not only provide professional guidance and opportunities, but also to foster meaningful connections in our community as a step towards building the bedrock for Tibetan excellence.
Photo from the Networking Conference
All of our work was not done in vain, as the conference proved to be a success, attracting participants from across the U.S. and garnering inspiring changemakers who shared incredible insights. We chose to celebrate with dinner after the event and it was only then, over plates of mouth-numbing Pad Kee-Mao and comically massive mugs of Thai iced tea, we finally sat together outside of the face-distorting, scene-limiting confines of Zoom. This was our first time meeting one another, yet we automatically felt a closeness by the nature of our work in sharing the same values and hopes for our community. We opened up about ourselves beyond the realm of Rokpa— our academic interests, our passions, why we joined, inside jokes about the joys and complexities of being Bhoepa in America (as well as Tseyang and Dadak’s enemies to lovers trope that characterizes their relationship timeline). The feeling of community, of family, at that dinner table was palpable. It reaffirmed our commitment not just to Rokpa’s mission, but to one another to continue making these spaces for our youth together.
The “comically massive mugs of Thai iced tea” in question…
Our Work
Throughout the rest of the year, we worked on various initiatives: virtual teach-ins, career chats, Tibetan Creatives Spotlight series, a College Fair and Conference, our reformed Rokpa Scholars program, conducting College Tours, and now starting this blog. With this, we aim to showcase voices in the diaspora to build an understanding of the intricacies and nuances in our varying lived experiences while also bridging us together by our collective nationality. We hope it allows Tibetan youth to find words they may be searching for to describe their experience and to be thereby equipped with language to bring their voices into academic discourse about the Tibetan experience, identity, and struggle.
College Fair and Conference amassing over 100 participants, August 2023
Teach-in on the significance of Tibetan Independence Day lead by scholar Darig Thokmay, February 2023
Rokpa winning the Lhakar Award for Innovation, August 2023
Perhaps one of the most meaningful changes we’ve made this year was the formation of our three defining pillars. We use these as a framework to guide our work and as an understanding of Rokpa’s unique contribution to the Tibetan community:
Tibetan Academic Excellence
Tibetan Professional Excellence
Equipping Tibetan youth with the knowledge to navigate their exilic experience
The birthplace of our three pillars at Board Retreat, July 2023
Our Values
We believe that every Tibetan is capable of making history in the Tibetan community, history in the world. As Tibetan children in Tibet are being stripped from the privilege of dreaming, one of our greatest forms of resistance in exile becomes achieving our own dreams. We may have grown up or spent our formative years in America, but we have all been raised by Buddhist values, by His Holiness’ teachings, and nurtured by the wisdom and culture that the generation before us have so carefully preserved and instilled in us. Our journey from Rokpa Mentorship to Rokpa is a testament to this Tibetan culture of compassion and service and the generation before us and for this we have immense gratitude. It is not easy doing what those before us did— losing one’s country, being torn apart from one’s brothers and sisters, and being uprooted from home. They have survived and now we, the Tibetan youth, must thrive. We feel privileged to have embarked on this journey, and we are excited to witness Rokpa continue to empower youth in innovative and substantial ways.
As we at Rokpa always say: Tibetans can, Tibetans will.