Adrian Lim, UK international alum from Malaysia, was the organizing chairperson for the Feed the Hunger initiative in Malaysia. This initiative provided meals and grocery supplies to households of daily wage earners around Subang Jaya, USJ Subang Jaya and parts of Sunway that were affected by the movement control order (MCO) restrictions in Subang Jaya.
The MCO in Malaysia was implemented in March of this year and is a cordon sanitaire implemented as a preventative measure by the federal government of Malaysia in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the country. The Malaysian government gave a 24-hour notice prior to a complete lockdown coming into effect. For this reason the Feed the Hunger initiative was implemented shortly after the MCO and ran up until early May.
Lim and his partner, the Lions Club of Subang Jaya set out to provide immediate relief from hunger to households caught in the lockdown. As the organizing chair for this initiative, Lim was responsible for managing the project, which included fundraising, ordering meals, logistics, coordination with local resident volunteers and getting relevant approvals from the authorities to carry out food distribution during the lockdown.
The Lions Club and local restaurants were able to help fund, coordinate, and manage the initiative. Meanwhile, local resident volunteers helped with the meal distribution to those households in need.
“The heroes of the project are the local resident volunteers. Without their help we wouldn’t have been able to distribute the amount of meals that we did,” Lim said. “We would have a small team of five to ten volunteers helping us daily to identify the households in dire straits and deliver the meals and groceries to them.”
On the first day of lockdown, Lim and the team started out with just 200 meals. Eventually, the team was able to deliver more than 1,000 dinner meals daily. By the end of April, they had donated more than 35,000 meals since the MCO was put in place.