Earn goodwill project writeup

“Successful people are always looking for opportunity to help others.

Unsuccessful people are always asking, “what’s in it for me” - Brain Tracy.

With this statement I would like to start my writeup for earn goodwill project. This is not just
a quote but also, I am a person who believes in it as well, helping others can only be done by
people with good heart and broader thinking. Under our project earn goodwill we were also
given a similar task to perform. We were required to visit a NGO for a period of time and
understand the framework on how that NGO is contributing to the welfare of the society and
imbibe some value from them.

For this project we choose an NGO called Robin Hood Army which is near Janeshwar
Mishra Park, Lucknow. This NGO has its presence in approximately 12 countries and more
than 170 cities. According to them “The challenge is not a lack of food — it is making food
consistently available to everyone who needs it.” The idea on which they are working is to
get surplus food from restaurants and the community to serve less fortunate people.

They are constantly working with the help of the volunteers whom they call as “Robbins”.
They are mostly students or young working professionals.

The vision which they have is to beat global hunger and bring out the best of humanity using
food as a medium. Their idea is to create self-sustained chapters across the world that will
look after their local community. And in the process, inspire people around them to give back
to those who need it most.

Apart from delivery food to the needy people by taking surplus foods from the restaurants.
They have also started teaching or providing basic education to the underprivileged children
across the cities. Till now they have enrolled more than 500 children in government schools.

When we visited the robin hood army, we observed some of their robins were teaching to the
underprivileged children who were from nearby areas only and those children who sell
balloons and other things on roads and in parks. We where overwhelmed by seeing the
enthusiasm of those kids who were playing, enjoying themselves while learning.

We were not able to give much of our time on that visit to those kids as we had different plan
of action in which we decided to make a visit to them on a different date in which we will
bring some food for them and we will also be a part in providing them some learnings but
those could not be executed due to the lockdown and social distancing scenario going on in
the country. But on that very visit we interacted with on of their robins and he told us that
they teach these kids on every weekday and, they teach those kids who cannot afford for
tuitions. They celebrate all kind of festivals with these kids and organise some sort of fun
competitions/programmes for them. They also, informed us that they don’t have any
workspaces and do not accept donations in form of money. They grew their reach through
partnerships or donations only in form of kind. While interacting we got to know that their
Organization grew mostly through social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram
where people share their experiences. If a person wants to join Robin Hood Army, they can
do it by- (i) giving three hours of spare time to Organization in a week at least twice a month.
(ii) By contributing regular meals if a person wants to donate food or a part of the restaurant.
(iii) By teaching the children of slums.
Meanwhile we also interacted with some of those kids over there and we also bought
balloons from one of them. Those kids were very fun loving and interactive. We asked them
some questions from mathematics like we asked them to tell us the table to 7 and they were
quite good at it. One of our team member asked a girl to sing a poetry and that little girl sang
“humpty dumpty sat on a wall” which reignited our whole childhood memories, we felt like
those relative who used to visit our house and our parents asked us to sing poetry for their
entertainment kind of a thing. Later there was one more Robbin with his guitar he came, and
we all were singing songs together. Those kids were having fun and with them we also
enjoyed a lot.
That was the only visit I could do to that place and that thought me a lot of things. Even when
those people don’t have a proper place to live, they struggle for every meal, instead of going
to school in this age they are selling some products on roads to get some money so that they
can have their meal. Still they have that much enthusiasm in them to come in evening and
study, to enjoy their life without thinking about what’s goanna happen next. We generally
think about our careers about our future even when we have a lot of support with still, we are
not that happy we are mostly worried, but those children were who have nothing were happy
maybe because they have a good heart.

Thank you,
Rajat agarwal
JL19FS041