Who We Are
LHF has a mission to promote, preserve, and transmit Lao culture through the arts. We do this by providing music and dance lessons year-round to students in the DMV free of charge. We also host summer camps that teach many aspects of Lao culture, such as traditional Lao dance, Lao language, food, sports, etiquette, history, arts and crafts, and holidays and traditions here locally and across the United States of America.
Since the launch of our first summer camp in 2007, an estimated total of 1400 students have attended all of our summer camps in America and in Laos. The summer camps in the DMV started in 2012 with an estimated total of 350 students in total attending our camps for the past seven years.
Our local program has a high rate of retention of about 95%. Our program teaches our students to become leaders of their communities. The older students become role models and teachers to the younger students. They continue to come back summer after summer to volunteer their time and give back to the community.
In the summer of 2019, we are scheduled to host a total of 9 summer camps and one pilot program benefiting over 300 Lao American Youths across the nation and another 300 children in Laos at our summer camp in Luang Prabang, Laos.
Our preservation efforts also include notating the various songs, as well as recording them for each instrument and making them available online to the general public free of charge. This is a crucial part of our work as Lao people come from an oral tradition where archiving is rare.
