SEVA – Serving Enabled Volunteers’ Army

There is a famous quote saying “Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile“.

In Vadodara, Gujarat(India), we are running a volunteers’ organization named SEVA, which stands for Serving Enabled Volunteers’ Army, working towards issues of food wastage and hunger.

Initially, it was started with the aim of collecting leftover food from events, restaurants, food vendors and serve food among people in need. Currently, we are distributing leftover food as well as specially cooked food for those people. All thanks to our donors, who are so kind for this noble work.

Our group has restricted ourselves by not collecting any money for this cause and just provide our time & efforts to actually feed the people.

Our donors provide us food or address to collect the food from, our team reaches there and serves the needy. To smoothen the process of informing group members about the food distribution drive we run a WhatsApp group, where one will send a Drive Alert message mentioning the day, time, food items, distribution place, and list of members who will join the drive. After completing the drive we again send a Drive Completion message with photos by adding how many people have been served with that available food.

During the Covid-19 lockdown(1st wave in India), our team has reached thousands of people by providing ration kits, face masks as basic needs. Again thanks to our donors who arranged the resources for them.

Our second entity works for providing free education to those children who can’t afford it on their own. We call it SEVA ki Paathshala, where our volunteers go to slum areas and teach those children living there. Yes, here also we don’t accept cash donations instead our donors provide us with the resources the children need.

During the 2nd wave, hospitals were flooded with patients and their belongings. The relatives of the admitted patients are running out of food for themselves as the partial lockdown was imposed in the city. Our team was provided with cooked meals for them by our donor which helped us to serve them for straight 33 days.

We have donors like daily fresh food shop owners, donors who directly pay caterers for cooked meals, donors who provide ration kits, donors who arrange stationeries and education resources for Paathshala students, and other donors who provide food on a daily, weekly & monthly basis.

If we talk about numbers, till now we have conducted 1350+ food distribution drives and served food of 340,000+ people in the span of 1.5 years. We are running Paathshala drives in 4 slums and we have 150+ students and 10+ teachers who teach them voluntarily. Thanks to our 20+ active donors to help us achieve this milestone.

If you have friends in your group ready to start SEVA work in your area or city please feel free to enquire us. If you want to run Pathshala, then register with us. If you are living in Vadodara and interested to join as a volunteer, then you are most welcome. And last if you are a donor and interested in donating something then please fill in your details in the Donor’s Form.