Ha Vin Tho left us yesterday, living until the end with the welcoming nature, kind strength and commitment to the world that always distinguished him.
We had the privilege of listening to him at our seminar on the audacity to fly high, and he truly embodied this audacity in his life and work. Of Vietnamese origin, from the war generation – even though he was born and raised outside that country – it was precisely the Vietnam War and the other wars he witnessed first-hand while working as a trainer for the International Red Cross Centre that led him to ask what we can learn from suffering and how we can alleviate it: how to alleviate it on a personal level – Tho founded special education schools for children who were victims of the war in Vietnam, for example – but also at a systemic level, by becoming aware of the structural, systemic dimension of violence.
The aspiration to promote well-being and “happiness” at the systemic level led to the extraordinary professional and human adventure that brought Tho to move to Bhutan with his wife Lisi and their family. Here, as program director of the Gross National Happiness Centre, he contributed to the development of a new paradigm of development that would go beyond economic growth – considering that GDP cannot be an end in itself but only one of the means of development – and would express the quality of life of people, of all citizens of a country. Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index – the result of that work – is a tool for measuring and promoting the development of the population in a holistic way, starting from a rigorous and multidimensional definition of what people’s well-being/happiness is.
His passion for education, shared with Lisi, then prompted Tho to bring this paradigm into schools, helping to develop a set of indicators that allow school outcomes to be measured in a multidimensional way – from academic results to social relationships, resilience, to openness to diversity – and giving rise to the Happy School project, which is spreading from Vietnam to various parts of the world.
His work and vision are deeply in tune with ADi’s high vision of school and will continue to be a source of inspiration and encouragement.
Mimma Siniscalco
27 settembre 2025
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Here you can see the video interview with Tho, by Lene Jensby Lange at the end of our seminar in Bologna, on 22 February 2025
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