Public Talk With Visiting Fellows: Lhamo Deva and Tashi Tsering
Public Talk With Visiting Fellows: Lhamo Deva and Tashi Tsering
E2E Invites you to attend: Tuesday, March 1 – Nau Hall 342
The Tibet Center at UVa and the Curry School of Education co-sponsored Education to Employment Initiative invites you to hear two speakers as part of our brown bag lunch seminar series. Visiting fellows Lhamo Deva and Tashi Tsering will share about their current work and their future aspirations, as well as take questions from the audience. Bring your lunch, and enjoy hearing from two participants in this important program.
Lhamo Deva: 11:30am – 12:15pm
Operations Manager, Winrock International
Tashi Tsering: 12:30pm – 1:15pm
Eastern Tibet Training Institute
Lhamo Deva has been the central Tibetan in Winrock International as its operations manager.
Winrock International is one of two primary recipients of USAID funding for work with Tibetan communities, and at present is of the main international NGOs working with Tibetans in China on a full spectrum of activities. Its three main areas are livelihoods, cultural preservation, and environmental conservation. As the operations manager in the home office in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, Lhamodeva plays a key role in all aspects of the work across all three areas and has a broad understanding of the work of Winrock and its diverse partners.
In her talk, Lhamo will introduce one of Winrock’s current projects in Kham and Amdo under the TSERING project.
Tashi Tsering
Eastern Tibet Training Institute
Tuesday, March 1
12:30-1:15pm, Nau Hall 342
Tashi Tsering is a new member of Eastern Tibet Training Institute (www.etti.org). ETTI was founded in 2004 as a not-for-profit community school working to improve the livelihoods of remote communities in China’s southwest through training-based poverty alleviation programs. ETTI’s flagship program is the Youth Pre-Employment Training Program. This program is designed to help unemployed rural youth find their first job. Participants receive training in languages, computer literacy, basic accounting, customer service and life skills. It also includes an on-the-job training component delivered in partnership with local enterprise. ETTI is located in Shangri-la, formerly Zhongdian, in Yunnan province. To date, more than 200 young people have graduated from the Youth Pre-Employment Training Program, with more than 90 per cent securing jobs before or soon after graduating. Graduates have found jobs in a variety of local enterprises. Some graduates have gone on to develop small businesses and tourism-related projects in their home villages.
Another part of Tsering’s work is a tourism company that he started with two other Tibetans in Beijing, China. High-end tourism is a growing area of China’s economy, but there was a lack of tour guides able to meet the growing demand. Tsering came up with the idea to train some Tibetans as high-end tour guides on the platform of ETTI.