Written by Craig Schreiner   “Many hands make work light; many ideas open the way.” —Hmong proverb The work of many hands and minds has made possible a virtual well of ideas related to Hmong language and culture open to anyone who wishes to drink from it. With help from the Heritage Language Education project at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, teaching professionals from across the U.S. came together to develop the <a href="https://www.hmonglanguageresourcehub.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Hmong Language Resource Hub website</a>, which launched in November of 2020. Teachers from eight public school districts, six public charter schools and four public colleges and universities from Wisconsin, Minnesota and California helped develop the website, which offers free, downloadable lessons that can be used by teachers to improve student-centered learning, particularly through Hmong language arts and culture. The site’s literacy, language, history, customs, arts and music lessons are also available to families, with the goal of supporting Hmong families whose children’s schools do not offer Hmong education for their children and of creating a new generation of bilingual speakers. In 2015 the Pew Research Center counted almost 300,000 Hmong Americans living in the country. Hmong, like Spanish, is considered a “heritage language” in the U.S. — a language that is used at home and in the community. Heritage speakers grow up with a range of abilities in languages other than English and have the potential for acquiring strength in those languages. But because heritage speakers do not generally have access to bilingual education in school, students and their families struggle to keep from losing their languages, which become steadily replaced by English. UW-Whitewater was an early leader in teacher training by expanding its existing professional programs to include Spanish heritage language education, led by Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction Jenna Cushing-Leubner.