To help indigenous Himalayan Buddhists build a more secure future for their children, their families, and their centuries-old traditional Buddhist cultures, the Conservancy has worked with local partners to reach out and identify the needs of under-served and disadvantaged communities in remote mountain areas.
To guide these efforts, the Conservancy conducted a pioneering, large-scale, community-based needs assessment to determine how best to help indigenous Buddhist communities preserve their endangered cultural and spiritual traditions — while simultaneously forming integrated development plans to ensure the economic sustainability of the communities.
Based on the findings of this needs assessment, the Conservancy developed specific programs to help indigenous Himalayan Buddhist communities living beyond the geographic borders of Tibet — reaching out to the many diverse indigenous groups living in a wide swath of the Himalayas that stretches more than a thousand miles across the Indian Himalayan region through Nepal and Bhutan.
The Conservancy’s Himalayan programs have focused over time on four main areas:
EDUCATION
In partnership with the Nepal Buddhist Federation, the Conservancy launched a Himalayan Scholarship program, aimed at helping children from remote villages receive an elementary school education in Tibetan schools in Nepal and India.
The first group of Himalayan Scholarship students on their first day of school at Namgyal Middle School.
TEACHER TRAINING
Partnering with the Institute of Buddhist Studies and Dialectics in Sarah, Himachel Pradesh, the Conservancy created a year-long Teacher Training program, aimed at educating Tibetan teachers who, upon graduation, agree to return to live and teach in remote Himalayan villages.
Graduates of our first Teacher Training program.
LANGUAGE PRESERVATION & LITERACY
The Conservancy has worked with local program partners to create, print and distribute basic learning texts and dharma teachings translated into Nepali, English and Tibetan, for distribution in remote mountain areas and use by schools in isolated villages where our needs assessments show the literacy rate is below 50%.
Himalayan students in class in Khumbu.
TRADITIONAL MEDICINE
To help serve the health needs of remote mountain communities, while supporting efforts to preserve millennia of traditional medical knowledge and healing practices, the Conservancy has worked to support the training of practitioners of traditional Tibetan medicine who go on to serve communities in isolated regions.
Practitioner preparing traditional Tibetan medicines.