SHEF’s Girls’ Education Initiative

Please help Study Hall Educational Foundation (SHEF) raise $25,000 to bring out-of-school girls in rural areas near Lucknow (India) to formal education!

About SHEF
Study Hall Educational Foundation (SHEF) runs a network of nine types of schools and programs, catering to different groups from rural and urban India, like girls, disabled children, rural youth, and children outside the formal school system. Its methodology is based on two critical innovations: Critical Feminist Pedagogy, a gender-empowering method of education; and the Universe of Care, a holistic ecosystem for learning that embeds trust, respect, empathy, openness and security in the physical environment and the relationships between students and teachers. To date, SHEF has scaled its model to over 900 government schools, trained 5,000 government teachers, and directly impacted a total of 503,080 children.

About the Project
The main aim of this project is to bring out-of-school girls near rural areas of Lucknow (India) to a formal school and provide them an empowering and rights-based education. These girls have either never been to a school or have dropped out too early due to various societal pressures and gender biases. SHEF is already working towards this aim in the urban areas of Lucknow through its Prerna Girls School. Prerna, founded in 2003, is a highly subsidised school for girls from extremely marginalized urban communities, with a feminist, rights based approach. More than 2500 girls have been educated in Prerna since its founding in 2003. Currently it has an enrolment of 1004 girls.


Our goal is to create an outpost of Prerna in rural areas. We plan to do this by increasing the enrollment of girls in another school run by SHEF called Vidyasthali School. Founded in 2005, Vidyasthali is an affordable rural school for girls and boys. The school is based in Malihabad, a rural district adjacent to Lucknow. Known as the mango belt of North India, Malihabad has a high Muslim population and clocks very low literacy levels. Almost half of Vidyasthali’s students are girls and all students come from 55 villages, within a radius of 19 miles. More than 1300 students have been educated in Vidyasthali since its inception in 2005. Vidyasthali is emerging as a rural education and community resource centre where children and youth deploy design-thinking to identify local problems, design solutions and then pilot them.



Project Plan
SHEF proposes to start a drive to identify and enroll out-of-school girls near Vidyasthali. The enrollment drive would entail:

1. Survey to find out which areas have the largest concentration of out-of-school girls.
2. Assembling a team of volunteers - Vidyasthali children - for the enrollment drive.
3. Equipping these children as agents of change by training them about the recruitment process.
4. Allocating small pockets of areas to the volunteer sub-teams lead by a senior individual who has good understand of local dynamics.
5. Once the children have been identified, an assessment study will be done to gauge whether contact classes will be held at a location in the village or at the school.
6. The geographic purview of the drive will be in the village where Vidyasthali is located - Kanar - and the villages adjacent to it.
7. Once the children are enrolled classes will start at the decided location.
8. The proposed first phase of the project will run for two years.

Budget of the Project
Our goal is to raise $25,000 through this platform. About $11,250 will cover the cost of teachers, $3500 are for registration of the students in the educational certification board, the rest the funding will cover the costs of transportation, outreach and enrollment campaign, administration, rent, stationery, study material and overhead costs.

How You Can Help
Please donate to our campaign so that we can continue our efforts to educate and empower girls. If you cannot donate, please share our campaign!

Study Hall Educational Foundation  | Facebook 


This project is supported by the Girls Opportunity Alliance.

Your donation to benefit this campaign/project will be allocated to the Girls Opportunity Alliance Fund (“GOA Fund”),  a project of GoFundMe.org (a U.S. public charity). The Girls Opportunity Alliance Fund may grant a refund in limited circumstances at its sole and absolute discretion, however, donations are not refundable after the GoFundMe  payment platform has transferred your donation to the Girls Opportunity Alliance Fund. Transfers from GoFundMe  to Girls Opportunity Alliance fund typically occur once monthly.  All donations are subject to the variance power of GoFundMe.org, as stated in the applicable GoFundMe.org policies(https://www.gofundme.org/policies/). Subject to applicable law, donations may be tax-deductible.

The GOA Fund is restricted to supporting girls' education and your donation is made for the support of the above described project. Notwithstanding that the campaign description may name a specific organization that is anticipated to engage in the projects, GoFundMe.org retains variance power, that is, discretion and control over how funds are disbursed within the purposes of the GOA Fund generally, and within the purpose of the project specifically. For example, if the project does not reach its minimum fundraising goal, GoFundMe.org  may re-assign money raised to another campaign within the GOA Fund.

As of April 11, 2019, the Direct Impact Fund operates as GoFundMe.org.