The Robin Hood Army is a zeo-fund completely volunteer-based organization that does something that is very very simple, yet very very effective. We collect excess leftover but absolutely edible food, from restaurants, caterers and other sources, and we give it to people who need it the most. The simple idea is to fight hunger and prevent wastage of food.
We like to believe that we don’t just distribute food, we serve meals. What I mean by that is, all our volunteers whom we call Robins, are encouraged not just to serve the food to people, but to interact with them, speak with them, click pictures with them, or even dance with them. The idea is that we consider food to be just the medium, to connect with the people whom we are looking to help. Also, the people we are serving, they are so marginalized, so as to say do disconnected from the society that you and I are a part of, that just spending half an hour or an hour with us means a big deal to them.
“THIS 28 MILLION (MEALS SERVED) WILL HOPEFULLY
BECOME 50 MILLION NEXT YEAR.
BUT IN INDIA ALONE, 196 MILLION ARE SUFFERING
BECAUSE OF SHORTAGE OF FOOD.
SO WE WOULD LIKE TO BELIEVE THAT WE
ARE ALWAYS AT ‘1 PER CENT DONE.”
For example, these clusters that we serve in, if we just take a selfie which takes three seconds with the kids who are there, it gives them so much happiness. So much so that we have started saying that we deal in smiles. We get paid back in smiles for doing what
we do. Even I believed that the problem of hunger exists oin the remote parts of the country before I became a Robin. That is not true. We met a a rickshaw puller from Lucknow who works 14 to 16 hours a day but cannot afford three meals a day. He smokes bidis during the day so that his hunger gets killed, so that he can take home a meal for his entire family. If this is happening in Lucknow, the capital of our largest state, you can imagine what would be the situation in the remote villages and interior areas. Hunger is much, much more than just missing a meal. What we need is three, nutritious, wholesome meals, wholesome being the key word.
Beyond Food
Yes, food is our core competency and it is what we do best. But we also believe that the Robin Hood Army can be anything that a Robin wants it to be. Food is the basic necessity and if we cannot provide that to our fellow citizens, we probably failed as a society. But like I said, food is also just the medium to connect with the people that we want to help. The incident that describes this best is the Lature water drive we did in 2016. Latur was going through a major drought then. Our Pune Robins sent out an appeal to people to donate water. People either bought water or they filled up water from their houses and donated it. Every three days, they would load the water bottles collected onto the train. A few Robins would travel with that water to the drought-affected areas. Remember that this is all voluntary. They did this for two months; 75,000 litres of water was distributed in those drought-affected areas. This is the power of community. This is what RHA stands for. This is the bigger picture of RHA, where we want to be a platform where like-minded people come together and try to do things that bring about positive change.
“ANYONE CAN BECOME A ROBIN.
ALL YOU NEED IS A LITTLE BIT OF INTENT
AND SOME COMPASSION.”
I would like to talk about another incident that happened in our Bangalore chapter. There is a gentleman called Appaji, who can neither speak nor walk. We had a Robin called Ashrith. Ashrith met Appaji on one of the regular food drives, became friendly with him. After a certain period of time, he just decided to surprise him and bought him a wheelchair. It’s something very small and very simple; all of us are capable of doing that. But if you looked at the smile on Appaji’s face, you would probably think he won the lottery.
Who Can Be A Robin?
I get asked many times how someone can be a Robin. We say that anyone can become a Robin. All you need is a little bit of intent and some compassion. And age is just a number for us.
Most of our volunteers are working professionals but we also have someone like Rehan, who started volunteering with us when he was three years old. On the other end we have Rahi uncle, a senior citizen, who can beat a teenager anyday with his energy and enthusiasm. He is out on the streets of Pune almost every night distributing food to people, serving people, and I cannot even tell you how many people he has inspired in our army just by his dedication.
A day in the life of Robins - all for that smile at the end.
Execution Above All Else
A principle we believe in the RHA is, ‘Think less, Do more’. We don’t like to overthink our ideas; what we favour above all things is execution. If we feel that an idea is good and disruptive, we just roll with it. The perfect example of that would be the Robin Hood Academy.
In the slums where we serve food, we have kids, who have never gone to school because of their circumstances or have dropped out. We impart education to them informally, get them on par with kids their age who have been going to school, get them admitted to the closest government school, and we ensure they go to school regularly. This idea also started as a random conversation between Robins of different cities. When they went to serve food, they were getting asked by kids about school, education, jobs. So the discussion was about what we could do about it, how we could solve the problem.
We knew we wanted to do something about it, but we had doubts — this was such a major problem. This was around three and a half years back. We started getting thousands of calls and messages. We started setting up a team, setting up a curriculum. On date, we have around 2,000 kids studying at our academies across all our chapters. The number that I am proud of is that 1,700 kids have graduated from our academies and they are attending regular schools. Another reiteration of the power of community.
The RoI
Human beings are selfish; I ask myself a lot of times what I am gaining out of this. I do this in my free time, I don’t get paid, what do I get from it? I tell myself that I am making a difference at my level. I get to work with some amazing, self-motivated people. I think what I have gained the most, is perspective. Having been born and brought up in India, I know what poverty our fellow citizens live in. But having met them frequently and having interacted with them so closely, I have realised that my problems are not problems. What Income Tax bracket I fall under and what will be the price of petrol are not problems. A genuine problem is when you realise if you don’t get work today, when you go home your infant kids won’t have milk to drink. So I have learnt to be much more thankful for whatever I have.
Since we are a volunteer organisation we don’t have too many rules, except for the one non-negotiable that I mentioned: that we are a zero funds organisation. Robin Hood Army was started in 2014. In the last five and a half years, we have managed to serve 28.4 million meals. What we have got in return is infinite blessings.
Just Getting Started
Another principle we work on is ‘1 percent done’. We don’t believe in spending too much time in congratulating ourselves. We execute one project and move on to the next one, because the problem that we are trying to fight is so deep-rooted and humongous. This 28 million (meals served) will hopefully become 50 million next year. But in India alone, 196 million are suffering because of shortage of food. So we would like to believe that we are always at ‘1 per cent done’.
RHA functions like a typical start-up. What is a start-up? You start small with an idea and if it is successful you will try to scale it. If it is successful at a larger scale as well, then obviously the start-up is successful and it is sustainable. When we started in 2014, we were five Robins. We served 150 meals in one city. As on date, we 40,000 Robins, present in 178 cities and we have served 28.49 million meals. We have realised that this idea is sustainable. In the last five years, what started as a passion and hobby, because of the start that we have had and the number of people we have given hope – who have started depending on us – this is a big, big responsibility now.
I promise you on behalf of the team that we are not going to stop. We are very sure that we are just getting started.
(Edited excerpts from Sanchit Jain’s address at the Innovation Conclave at IIT Bombay’s E-Summit 2020 on 2nd February. Stimulus Unplugged was Innovation Media Partner.)