Photo by Saumya Khandewal

Every evening on the streets of Pune, in western India, a 67-year-old man coordinates a food drive to benefit the people in his community. As a local leader in the Robin Hood Army, a nonprofit volunteer organization, he’s on the front lines of an ambitious mission to end world hunger, community by community.

“Every night, 365 nights a year, he’s out there,” says Neel Ghose (MBA 2019), cofounder of the Robin Hood Army. “For him, it’s his own baby. It’s a platform for goodness.”

This platform for goodness—which operates like a franchise model, with an umbrella organization housing nascent chapters—features hyperlocal food drives. “The food comes from restaurants or corporations in the neighborhood, and our volunteers are residents of that neighborhood,” Ghose explains. The beneficiaries can be homeless people, or residents of orphanages or old-age homes who are around the locality.

Ghose launched the Robin Hood Army while working for a company called Zomato, India’s largest food-delivery app. His job was to set up Zomato in international markets, live in the countries for six to nine months at a time, and establish local partnerships. It was in Portugal that Zomato teamed up with ReFood, a company that repurposed surplus food from restaurants to feed the local community. Ghose liked the concept. Every day, some 25,000 people lose their lives to hunger each day, according the UN, while a third of the food produced is thrown away. The opportunity was obvious.

In an effort to replicate the idea in his home country of India, Ghose studied ReFood’s model, spoke to its founder, and took that knowledge home to two friends. One evening in August of 2014, the small team hit the streets of New Delhi with food for 150 people, thinking it might be a challenge to find enough people to take it off their hands. The realization that evening was sobering: Thousands of people around them were in need. “When you live in a country like India, you tend to just normalize what you see around you,” observes Ghose of the more than 80 million people there who live at or below the nation’s poverty line. “And you don’t really think twice about the amount of inequality there might be just 10 minutes from where you live.”

The team made some quick determinations: “Doing food drives once in a while is not going to really make a fundamental difference,” says Ghose, explaining that the drives occur often enough to reach as many mouths as possible. He designed the organization like a startup, built to scale, with chapters of “Robins” around the world who team up with restaurants and other organizations in their local cities and communities. Marketing is handled through social media and partnerships. There is only one cardinal rule: No money should ever change hands.

“Outside of that, folks are free to be innovative,” Ghose says. “And that’s where the creativity really shines.” Because the organization is so decentralized, people can work within their particular neighborhoods to meet the residents’ needs—whether that’s feeding folks in a homeless shelter or bringing meals to a local orphanage.

That push to innovate proved important during the pandemic as the Robin Hood Army tried to reach senior citizens in lockdown. The elderly weren’t necessarily impoverished, observes Ghose, but they didn’t have easy access to stores and meals through the early months of the pandemic. “We partnered with Uber and WhatsApp in #SeniorPatrol,” says Ghose. “People would reach out via the Robin Hood Army WhatsApp chatbot to help aged relatives who lived by themselves, across more than a hundred cities. Our Robins would use free Uber rides to help the senior citizens with essentials like groceries and medicines throughout the lockdown.” The partnership with Uber has grown over the past two years, and the company has since offered 100,000 free rides for Robins across India to transport meals, not only to senior citizens but also to typical recipients.

There’s an important lesson, Ghose notes, in the outsized impact the Army has had, given the free rides, free meals, and free time from volunteers: “We learned a lot of non-business skills in business school, like how important purpose and culture and motivation are. And how money does not even need to be a part of that. I think witnessing the impact while serving in the field is motivating enough; the people we serve and their stories are motivating enough.”

To date, Robins have served 83.2 million people in 269 cities across 13 countries, through a network of 183,900 volunteers. How close are they to their goal? One percent. “Obviously, the problem is gigantic,” says Ghose of the more than 800 million people worldwide who go hungry each day, according to the UN. “But whether we serve a million meals or whether we serve ten, every meal does its bit to make a difference and spread a smile.”

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