Soup Kitchen service in cash – an Open Speech
[You are the Chairman of the Rotoract Club in your school. As a service orientated club, you want to follow in the footsteps of your parent clubs, Rotary Club and Inner Wheel Club. Give a talk about Soup Kitchen where members can offer service in cash or in kind.]
Good evening, friends. We are gathered here to look into how we can be of service to the community. One of the ways is to volunteer to be part of the teams involved in a Soup Kitchen. I recommend the Pertiwi Soup Kitchen. The Pertiwi Soup Kitchen is a Community Outreach Effort.
What Are Soup Kitchens? Soup kitchens can be found in many of the world’s cities. They exist to provide basic meals to those who go hungry, not because they are lazy or are looking for handouts, but because they simply cannot get enough food or proper nutrition. Those in need may include children, parents, and the elderly. Some of them are homeless, jobless, and infirmed, unable to find jobs to live a decent life. They do not ask for cash handouts. They want any paying job which can give them a roof over their heads and 3 decent meals a day. Their advanced years prevent many from being employed.
Malaysia’s economic success and prosperity have ensured that hunger is not a matter of not having any food at all, but whether those in need are getting enough food on a regular basis. Moreover, do we care enough to provide food for them?
How did the Pertiwi Soup Kitchen get started? The PERTIWI Soup Kitchen has been established to provide regular meals at various locations around Kuala Lumpur on a regular basis. This community outreach effort has been established and managed by Pertubuhan Tindakan Wanita Islam (PERTIWI), one of Malaysia’s longest-running NGOs. It had the initial support of the Rotary Club of Kuala Lumpur DiRaja and some individual sponsors.
Soup kitchens provide an important way to give back to the community. They offer a healthy meal to those who are in need. The few soup kitchens that do operate in Kuala Lumpur are already providing this critical service. However, there are still too many hardcore poor and homeless people in our city who are unable to eat on a daily basis. This project will complement these existing efforts.
The Pertiwi Soup Kitchen has the following objectives:
- To distribute basic pre-packaged healthy meals and clean water 4 nights a week in inner-city neighborhoods where various recipient groups are located.
- To raise awareness of the number of hardcore poor in our city.
- To encourage corporate and media sponsorship, and regular volunteer participation to feed the hungry.
- To operate the program in a sustainable manner that will enable it to serve an increasing number of people.
The PERTIWI Soup Kitchen project provides a humanitarian food-aid service to the hardcore poor irrespective of race or religion. By interacting with various destitute inner-city communities on a regular basis, additional support programs would be established to assist those ready for assistance to become more independent. A Job Agency could be set up to source employment for the healthy and able-bodied. Temporary hostel facilities could be set up for those unable to find cheap and affordable lodgings on getting employment. A Lending Agency could be established to tide new employees over the first month of employment until they are paid.
To help kick-start this important community effort, the Rotary Club of Kuala Lumpur DiRaja had donated a Nissan Vanette C22 van to be used for the distribution of meals.
Now what Pertiwi wants are more volunteers to help in the preparation of meals, the packing of food packets, the logistics of loading onto the transport vehicles to go to designated places to hand over these meals to those unable to get to the soup kitchens themselves.
Currently, Pertiwi goes to the homeless and the hardcore poor. But in the foreseeable future, Pertiwi is looking into the service which offers a one-stop center for the soup kitchen to function. Besides preparing hot meals, Pertiwi hopes to provide baths and laundry facilities whereby the homeless and hardcore can avail themselves of such basic needs.
We, as members of the Junior Club, should volunteer to help the Soup Kitchen on a regular basis. We can be kitchen helps, food packers, members of the cleaning and washing teams as well as accompany the food distributors as they go about in the city to hand freshly cooked food to the poor and the homeless.
It does not mean that we spend all our time at the Soup Kitchen but we sacrifice our free time to lend a helping hand to an NGO to lift up the spirits of the destitute.
Think about what I propose. At our next meeting, we will take a vote on it and liaise with our parent clubs to inform them of our intentions.
Thank you for your time. We’ll meet again.
