It began with a Tibetan couple’s search.

When our children were small, my wife and I looked for Tibetan cartoons to show them. We found none. We looked for a Tibetan font a child would love, and found only the formal type of print. We looked for songs they could sing along to, and found elders who carried songs no one had ever recorded.

So we tried to teach our children Tibetan ourselves. We started and stopped. We grew tired, let weeks slip by, and started again. We are still trying, every day. It is harder than it should be, and we know we are not the only family who feels it.

Why does it matter so much? Because of something we cannot fully prove, but feel deeply.

Long before there was a foundation, there was the work. For many years I served our community in New York. I co-founded the Himalayan Elders Project to care for our elders, who taught us far more than we ever gave them. We brought rare voices back from failing tape, and restored a great master's teachings for the people who still listen to them. I built tools for writing Tibetan, a tuner for the dranyen, and songs and cartoons for children. Each was an attempt at one thing: to keep our culture clear and open to the people inheriting it.

What we were building needed a home that would outlast us.

We felt the weight of it, and the urgency. And we knew that work this vast could never be done by the two of us. So we reached out. One by one, scholars, artists, teachers, masters and volunteers joined us, and together we formed the Terma Heritage Foundation.

A terma གཏེར་མ is a treasure hidden for the future, and found when the time is right. We think of our work the same way. The typefaces, the dictionary, the games, the readers and the tools we make are not ours to keep. They are for a child we will never meet, a teacher in a classroom we will never see, a grandmother who will one day hear her grandson's English in Tibetan. Each one reaches further than any of us could alone, and keeps working long after we have stopped.

Today we are moving faster than ever, building the tools a living language needs to be read, written, spoken, learned and played, with its masters still teaching beside them. None of it is the whole answer. But together it moves the Tibetan language one step forward. And then another.