Category Archives: News

April Cheng is riding for Lotus Outreach for the second year in a row! Her ride on May 8th and 9th is the third consecutive annual bike ride event hosted by LO Taiwan and is a part of our 1,000 Coffee initiative at LO. This year’s ride is 96 km up Yuchang Road, a beautiful and challenging route in the mountains of southeast Taiwan. April will ride with teacher, Rachic Sra, and a team of 15 bikers from Junyi High in Taitung City, Taiwan. This is the first in a series of three bike rides that April and the Grade 11 Bike Group at Junyi plan to organize this year for LO beneficiaries in connection with 1,000 Coffee events. The next rides will be June 18-20th and July 1-10!

The first artist featured for our Art for LO series is a dear friend of Lotus Outreach, Ms. Emily Avery Yoshiko Crow. Emily offered her Kali of Calcutta painting to LO, recognizing the volatility present in our world is affecting the most vulnerable, especially girls. Kali is a powerful goddess traditionally worshipped throughout Nepal and India. Her message is connected with harnessing the potential of challenge, volatility, and destruction for the benefit of humanity. In many spiritual traditions she is a divine protector and object of prayer. We are honored to make available Ms. Crow’s painting as a special edition Kali of Calcutta T-shirt and Kali of Calcutta Art Print through the LO Store. We are deeply grateful for her generosity in dedicating the proceeds of these items to the girls who are LO beneficiaries.

At the heart of the pandemic is an education crisis. Access to education is under threat, particularly for children from low income and marginalized communities. Children have never been more vulnerable to dropping out of school, especially girls. Nearly 1.6 billion children from 190 countries were out of school at the height of the pandemic. Lotus Outreach continues to operate our programs where possible, serving the most vulnerable families, communities, and students with crucial support so that families do not give up. Our team is working tirelessly to ensure the children and female scholarship recipients we serve stay connected and committed to their educational goals even as schools remain closed.

The covid-19 pandemic has had an unprecedented effect on education around the world, it is the largest interruption of schooling in history with 1.5 billion students out of school across 190 countries.

We are delighted to announce Riding for Girls #Taiwan, a 4-day bike ride along the Northeast coast of Taiwan, spearheaded and organized by 15 year old April Cheng in tandem with Lotus Outreach Taiwan. The ride is dedicated to the young women and girls that are beneficiaries of LO programs who, like April, are beacons of change in their communities.

Our COVID-19 response was built on the networks of our existing programs and team. In March we pivoted and since then have had a multidimensional response to the needs of the communities we serve. Since the campaign we have applied $21,413 in relief funds across multiple programs including EQU+, Kapadia Scholars, Garden of Peace, Buddha Smiles, ASHA, CATALYST, GATE, and Integrated Rural Development (IRD). We are astonished at the far reaching impacts of this single campaign.

With the funds raised for LotusRelief India we will distribute 5,000 masks and 30,000 bars of soap to approx. 30,000 families in 150 villages. We expect he’ll be delivering them daily for the next two months. There were local restrictions on movement which meant he could reach only a few villages a week to begin but we anticipate he will very soon be delivering soap and masks to 5+ villages a day.

Raksmey and Pisey are closely monitoring all CATALYST scholars and GATE students in grade 12 while staying in close contact and providing essential psychological support. Although connectivity issues come up Raksmey and Pisey see to it that no girl is out of touch for more than a few days.

Lotus Outreach International is joining #GivingTuesdayNow | A Global Day of Giving and Unity to bring attention to the emergency needs presented by the consequences of the corona pandemic around the world and for our beneficiaries. We have established LotusRelief, an initiative to meet the urgent needs of the vulnerable communities we serve during crisis. 

Consoling Through Counseling</a> provides trauma therapy, social assistance, and small business grants to survivors of human trafficking, sexual abuse and domestic violence residing in a women's shelter in rural Cambodia. Nine year old Srey Touch is one of these survivors. Her story is a very difficult one. It's a hopeful one, too.