Robin Hood Army: Curbing food wastage and feeding the hungry

By Fathima Riznaz Hafi 

The Robin Hood Army, a volunteer based organisation founded in India, gathers surplus food from restaurants and distributes it to the poor. This food is fresh and edible but in excess and would therefore have been thrown out by restaurants and other food establishments. The concept here is to avoid food wastage by re-directing excess food to the hungry.

Since its launch in 2014 the Robin Hood Army has expanded to 14 countries which include Malaysia and Australia, with Sri Lanka joining them in October last year. The team in Sri Lanka is headed by brothers Hanzalah and Abdurrahman Haroon, who after learning about the mission got in touch with the founders in India and set about organising activities of the same nature in Sri Lanka, while the founders in India provide guidance on how to run the operation. 

“In Colombo we are still small and started off distributing mainly to people in our area – Kolpetty. Expanding further we started providing for people in Meethotamulla, Maligawatte and Thotalanga and will go to more places,” said Hanzalah. 

“It is completely volunteer-run – everything from picking the food up, re-packing and dropping them off. Anyone who has some extra time on their hands can volunteer with us. We collect the surplus food from participating restaurants, re-pack it in a more presentable way and distribute it to people who need it. If it requires re-packing we do that but if it is given to us in a presentable format we distribute it as it is,” Abdurrahman added.

“The food is not just from restaurants – it’s open to everyone – even hotels; but with hotels there are some legal issues that we are facing (they are not allowed to give food) and we are working on that angle. We should be able to solve this in a few months.” 

Stressing that they are careful where the food is sourced from and that it has to be from a reputable source, Abdurrahman explains, “It can get complicated; we are trying to maintain integrity; we don’t know which food is fresh as it’s a bit tough to distinguish and if we distribute food that is not fresh and someone gets sick from that, it’s going to come back on us and give us a bad image. 

“We are aiming to achieve something – we want to solve two problems at once: Food wastage as well as hunger. That’s why we collect surplus food and give it to the poor. That way food is not wasted and people are being fed.”

The activities are carried out once a week. For now it’s every Saturday evening – with a few restaurants contributing consistently on a weekly basis. “We are trying to expand and make it to a daily basis but that depends on the volunteers. If there are people who are able to do this on other days, we can have distribution on other days as well. Right now we are doing this only on Saturdays because the two of us are only free on the weekend so Saturday works for us,” Hanzalah explained. 

When they started off in October they served 100 packs; that’s 100 people on their first drive. They had around six volunteers. Now they’ve grown and serve around 850 people every week and have around 20-25 volunteers – that’s the people who are active. 

“We’ve got a lot of people signing up but they don’t have time to make it work. Most of our volunteers are students but we also have working people who have signed up from all over the country, to help distribute food but getting them to gather in one area for meetings is a bit challenging so we are working on that.” 

In conclusion they stressed, “We don’t accept any monetary donations – as part of the Robin Hood Foundation, we only want food, volunteers and time. We have a lot of volunteers coming in now but not enough food. We need more restaurants to come forward because when we go into the poor areas we are not able to satisfy everyone there. Our aim is to satisfy as many people as possible.”

Pix by Shehan Gunasekara