Overview

Kusuma Flowers.jpg

The Kusuma* Trust UK (The Trust) is an independent grant-making organisation and was set up in 2008.  The Trust is registered with the Charity Commission and Companies House in the UK.

Vision

The Trust believes that every child and young person has the potential to transform and improve their life, and should have opportunities to grow and develop as active and productive citizens in their communities.

Mission

Our mission is to facilitate and increase access to education and other life opportunities for children and young people, with a focus on the most economically disadvantaged.  The Trust enables children and young people to realise their potential and break the inter-generational cycle of poverty.

The Trust also supports innovation, new developments in higher education, training and advocacy, all of which have enormous potential to benefit society.

Background

The Trust was set up in 2008 to implement the philanthropic aspirations of its founders, Dr Soma Pujari and her husband Anurag Dikshit, and is a registered charity and company within the UK.  The Trust is headquartered in London and supervises the work of a small team based in India - the Kusuma Foundation - which is a registered non-profit company based in Delhi, that monitors the projects we fund, which are currently located in the four states of Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand.

The founders continue to donate personally to other projects through Kusuma Trust Gibraltar.

*Kusuma means a flower in Hindi and is the name of the mother of one of the Founders.

What we do

Our work is in the areas of Education, Research, Training and Advocacy, which includes Children At-Risk, Internet and Open Space and Research and Advocacy.

Where we work

We will concentrate efforts in three districts - Sambalpur in Orissa, Hardoi in Uttar Pradesh and Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh.  The two districts in Orissa and Uttar Pradesh are among the lowest performing in these three States based on selected education and human development indicators.  We will also support selected initiatives at national level and initiatives with national policy relevance.

We target

  • Motivated and high performing young people from economically disadvantaged backgrounds
  • Teachers and government education officials working in the target areas
  • Frontline staff working with children at-risk
  • We will support programmes that engage parents and are integrated into communities
  • Appropriate higher education institutes

How we work

Our core values include being apolitical, secular, efficient, responsible and mutually respectful.  The guiding principles for our work are excellence, innovation, openness, transparency, focus on results and outcomes, collaboration, financial responsibility and communication.

We work with a range of strategic and implementation partners to deliver programmes in the four strategic areas.  In particular, we work very closely with our affiliate, the Kusuma Foundation in India, which supports the delivery of The Trust’s mission and strategy by managing, supporting and monitoring our grants. We support projects for 3-5 years and look for matched funding where feasible.

We collaborate with and build upon the work of other donors and philanthropists, implementers, government agencies and research institutions, using evidence to inform our work.

We will evaluate our work every 3-5 years.

Funding

We aim to make grants totaling £4m to £6m per year over the next three years.  Seventy-five percent of our grants will support work in education and at least ten percent will support research and advocacy.

A Learning Organisation

The Trust is an independent family-based grant making philanthropic organisation that will learn from what it funds and share learning widely.  We will encourage new thinking to solve existing challenges, we will promote a partnership model that values the views of partners equally, and we will ensure that research is integrated into our work.  We will also promote open learning and sharing of what works and what is not successful.