Organization background
Lotus Outreach International (LO) is a US based charitable organization dedicated to ensuring the education, health and safety of at-risk and exploited women and children in India and Cambodia. Its activites in India are implemented through its sister organization in India (White Lotus Charitable Trust) and its partners (Spirit in Life) .

Project background
As a nation, India is a land of bright promise but also extremely poor. The ramifications of this poverty are high child mortality rates, malnutrition rates and a high rate of illiteracy. A significant reason for the high illiteracy, especially in rural areas is that children are encouraged not to go to school, as they can be put to work either in a laborer setting, or in taking care of the home. Approximately 70 rural million children receive no schooling whatsoever. India's Haryana state is relatively wealthy but houses one of the most regressive districts in terms of education in all of India. Although it is close to Delhi, India's capital, Haryana's Mewat district, lags behind the rest of the state on most development indices: there are few paved roads, electricity is only available three hours a day and medical facilities are dilapidated at best. The population comprises of about a million people from the Muslim Meo tribe. The community relies on agriculture for subsistence, and the lack of development has extracted a disproportionate toll on Mewat's female population, who bear the burden of maintaining the household, working in the fields and child rearing. Consequently, very few of these women study beyond the primary level, and female literacy rates linger at an abominable 2.13 percent.

Blossom Bus (Female education, north India)
Lotus Outreach has developed the Lotus Education as a Right Network (LEARN) to enroll school-aged children who are currently left out of the education system, and to bring substandard schools up to par through Right to Education advocacy. The belief is that providing girls with basic education is one of the most powerful catalysts for remedying poverty and its tragic consequences. The greatest obstacle to female education in Mewat is a prevailing conservative attitude towards women. The scarcity of secondary schools prevents girls from continuing their education in their own village; while boys travel to neighbouring villages, girls are strictly forbidden from leaving their own villages without an escort. For the Meos, allowing a woman to travel unprotected invites temptation and moral transgression.

Buddha Smiles (Informal tutoring, south India)
Lotus Outreach takes the viewpoint that if education is to become universal, then the public education system has to succeed and an efficient way to do this is to augment the education that children receive in public schools, through supplemental tutoring. LO has supported night tutoring for hundreds of impoverished children in rural Tamil Nadu since 2002 through the BuddhaSmiles project . In this project, tutoring classes are provided five to six nights per week, and help an average of 350 children per school year succeed in the formal education system. Students struggling with homework or concepts covered in day classes have a regular resource to prevent them from falling behind. Moreover, surrounded by other students of their own socio-economic status, they are more comfortable asking questions and participating.
The tutoring classes are conducted usually at one of the villagers houses, or in informal surroundings (such as the village community center). Tutors are recruited from the local population and paid a monthly stipend.

Project description

Blossom Bus
To overcome the societal objections to female schooling, Lotus Outreach runs a chaperoned bus service, the Blossom Bus, which picks up girls from their villages, takes them to school and brings them back. The buses are actually small vans that are rented from private companies at a negotiated cost to transport per girl.

BuddhaSmiles
This is a nightly tutoring program operates in fifteen villages a few hours southwest of Chennai. The costs involved are primarily monthly stipend and travel allowance for the tutors and the coordinator of the program. Additional costs of the program are travel allowance for volunteers, and some administrative costs.

GKF contributions to LO are as follows: