Free Food Society

When economic sectors reopened after the pandemic and people found jobs, appeals for food aid were less. There however continues to exist pockets of people in need – the disabled, orphanages and children’s homes, university students, people affected by natural disasters, transient communities and other groups that continue to need food aid. FFS continues to respond to them.

Despite the improving job situation however, FFS identified a need to help communities out of poverty in a more sustainable manner. Based on the government’s information on low-income communities in Kuala Lumpur, FFS selected one community to work with in PPR Desa Rejang, Setapak. The selection was based on its demographics: a multiracial community, very low-income levels and many school-going children within the community.

A strategy was developed to help the community and since mid-2023, FFS implemented 2 main activities: food aid twice monthly to 85 families, and a tuition program for their children. Primary school children who could not read, write or count when schools reopened after the pandemic were able to do so after attending our tuition program.

Encouraged by the success of students attending the primary school tuition program, FFS then started tuition for secondary school students the following year. Five of our students sat for the SPM examinations in 2025 and when the results were announced in March 2026, our students achieved outstanding results. Students who had previously failed or did poorly in the subjects we taught – i.e. Maths, English, Bahasa Malaysia, Science and History did well and some scored several ‘A’s – with the top student scoring 8 ‘A’s.

A unique feature of our tuition program is that tutors are university students selected from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia located next door to Desa Rejang. There are also students from Universiti Islam (UIA) nearby. Using university students as tutors is a win-win strategy for us: the children they teach respond well to these young, bright university students and the students themselves benefit from the income they get from being tutors. The youthful energy exuded by both tutors and the children during the tuition sessions certainly creates an exciting environment for learning and the results achieved are testimony to the success of this strategy.

Based on the successful implementation of these 2 activities in Desa Rejang, FFS plans to replicate these projects elsewhere in the future.

Skills Training and Entrepreneurial Development

In 2024, FFS also started an entrepreneurial program for women living in a B40 community. The pilot project was for a group of women, mainly single mothers, from flat Impian Baiduri in section 51a, Petaling Jaya. Most of the women had already been selling food in stalls in their area. With the help of the Reliance College for Culinary Arts, a college within the BAC Education Group, the women were given classes on how to prepare and present the food they were selling in order to improve its appeal to customers. They were taught techniques on freezing the food so they can build some inventory for their business. Recipes for new menu items were taught to give them ideas to expand their product range. FFS also organised a course on financial management for the women to teach them costings and pricing. A workshop on social media and digital marketing was also held to teach the women how best they can use the medium to market their products. At the end of the course, 4 women judged to have the best social media presentations were each given a portable freezer for their food business, courtesy of a donation from legal firm Konexo Malaysia Sdn Bhd. FFS has also helped the women to secure food catering orders for some events.

In the beginning…

Concerned with the economic situation caused primarily by the covid-19 pandemic, several friends gathered together in December 2020 with the objective of “doing something” to help the then ever-increasing number of people in Malaysia who have lost their jobs and are in need of food. The group decided to register an organisation and by March 2021, Persatuan Makanan Ehsan -Free Food Society (FFS) was approved by the Registrar of Societies (ROS).

Our first meeting was on April Fool’s Day and since then we have not stopped our activities. By the end of August 2021, over 13,000 families all over Malaysia had received food aid valued at almost RM700,000 from FFS. From the very beginning, FFS made a conscious decision and wrote it into our constitution that we would administer food aid to families, individuals and the hungry and needy, irrespective of race, religion and creed. Our only criterion is needy – and throughout our months of operation we provided food aid to the local B40 communities who have lost their jobs, refugees from Rohingya, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somali and various others, the marginalised communities such as the LGBT, those released from prison and seeking out new beginnings, those with HIV-AIDs, the visually impaired, the disabled, school children who had lost family members and caregivers to Covid, and so on: the list goes on.

FFS is indeed fortunate to have amongst us people with the passion, the experience, the skills and the resources to put together a workable plan of action and to make that plan work. Two very special members of our team have been instrumental in getting us going in the right direction: Mr Rajasingham, the CEO of the Brickfields Asia College group of companies quickly mobilised his team of designers and within days was able to design all the various pieces of promotional materials required – our logo, our tagline, banners, buntings and t-shirts. He also made available a venue for us to use as warehouse and distribution centre which was a tremendous help for us in collecting and distributing food aid.

Mr Rick Chee, founder of Food Aid Foundation, has a wealth of experience in feeding those in need and he gave us valuable guidance and the know-how needed to run our operations and manage the logistics. With such valuable support from both individuals, FFS was able to put in place the necessary systems to manage our operations. With support from donors, especially food retailer Jaya Grocer, FFS was able to deliver food packages throughout the country. Partner organisation and other NGOs were instrumental in organising the logistics that saw FFS food packages helping people in need in Peninsula Malaysia, Sabah and Sarawak.