About Tibet and LHA

LHA is 100% donation-funded and volunteer-staffed. No founder or board member has ever taken salary or a profit of any kind. Our office space is donated. Every dollar we raise or generate with our endeavors goes directly to Tibetans.

Since China's 1949 invasion of Tibet, more than a million Tibetans have been killed. Tibetan people and their ancient culture, developed over the course of millennia, face annihilation. Many Tibetans, including spiritual and temporal leader His Holiness the Dalai Lama, fled Tibet on foot over the Himalayan mountains. India's Prime Minister welcomed them, providing safe passage, resources, and land in Dharamsala, where Tibetans created a government in exile and began building schools and monasteries to maintain their cultural, spiritual, and educational traditions. Without housing, healthcare, education, employment, they faced huge resettlement issues.

In 1997, an American traveling in India and Nepal noted two things: 1) How far a dollar goes to help Tibetan refugees, and 2) How much he learned from the resilient, fascinating Tibetans. With a newly arrived refugee from Amdo, Tibet, he formed LHA. The pair were determined to develop effective, affordable social service programs to address the needs of the Tibetan community, and to bring Tibetan wisdom and ancient teachings out to the wider world.

From a tiny room in a Dharamsala monastery, their endeavors yielded immediate results, attracting volunteers and supporters worldwide. By 2000, LHA had a Board of Directors, U.S. government 501c3 nonprofit status, and well-attended Louisiana fundraising events which continue annually to this day.

In 2001, LHA moved into a metal shed, which housed an English language class, medical supply room, craft shop, and office with two computers donated by author Hunter S. Thompson! The following year, LHA partnered with the Tulane University School of Social Work to bring a student group to India, the first of many groups to come. In 2004 LHA moved again, to a larger, Tibetan-owned space.

LHA's founders always intended to create a self-sufficient, sustainable, Tibetan-run organization. By 2005, when LHA received official non-profit status from India's government, LHA's Tibetan staff had learned to run the organization, and earn income by offering Tibetan language and cooking classes, yoga, massage, and translating services to tourists.

In 2007, LHA bought the Ahimsa House, a 4-story building alongside the home and temple of the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. Service center offices, plus language and computer classrooms remained in the original location. The new building's first floor was transformed into a commercial kitchen and dining hall, which is used variously as a soup kitchen providing free healthy meals to needy Tibetans, a hands-on chef's training center, and cafe and coffee shop serving tourists. Upper floors provide accommodations for volunteers and groups.

Today, LHA has 9 full-time Tibetan staffers in India serving the local community, coordinating international volunteers, assessing changing needs, managing ongoing programs, and starting new initiatives when necessary. In Louisiana, LHA maintains two Louisiana community centers to host Tibetan scholars, organize cultural events, fundraise and collect resources needed to support projects in India.

All the while, Westerners who visit report overwhelmingly positive developments occur in their own lives resulting directly from exposure to Tibetan people and their teachings.

The bridge LHA built and maintains is sturdy. Resources, volunteers and social services flow across to Tibetans exiled in India, while ancient Tibetan wisdom flows out to the world. In 2013, when the Dalai Lama visited Louisiana, he said: Tibetans have developed practices to study the mind and human nature for more than 2,000 years. Prior to China's invasion in 1949, monks and nuns made up one third of Tibet's population. The focus of the country was the study of the mind, to develop an understanding of how it works and to apply practices which free it from suffering and ignorance, from anger, jealousy, anxiety, and depression. Ignorance is considered the lack of proper understanding – the root cause of all suffering. Tibetan Buddhist psychology works to remove suffering from the root.