Josna Valsa Joseph has started a project where they share their food with the hungry
Volunteers of ‘Skip a Meal'. (Photo: Dharini Narayan)
Chennai: Josna Valsa Joseph is a second year student at Madras Christian College who has started an initiative for the homeless, called ‘Skip a Meal’. It started in the middle of July with five volunteers and seven packets of food.
In a short while though, the scale of the project has grown. “It has been six weeks since we started this. I spoke to Arpan Roy from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), for a college assignment.
He had initiated an enterprise like this in TISS, Tuljapur, and inspired me too to do so locally. The first time, I was not sure if this was something I wanted to do; but when I saw the smiles on the faces of these people when they got the food, that stayed with me forever,” says Josna.
The team now has 20 volunteers from the college and they hand out about 50 packets of food. “We skip our Saturday lunch and pack the food. We started out concentrating on the Tambaram area.
Last week, we branched out to Guindy and T. Nagar. For hostelites like me, we skip food on many days because we do not like that day’s fare. So skipping a meal does not make a big difference to me, but my doing so helps so many others,” she adds.
This group of collegians is going a step further to help the homeless with shelter too. “We are trying to talk to homes that provide shelter to the needy,” says the group.
( Source : dc )
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