The 1Meal Program: The Beginning
Starting something new is never easy; Change is usually met with resistance. But for the 1Meal Program when it was launched in April of 2011 it felt like the universe meant for it to happen. The people who were needed to give life to such an endeavor appeared almost magically. My mom, Teresa Chan, the founder of the 1Meal Program, and I had never met any of the would-be Core group members until a year or two before its inception. This group of people is the reason why the 1Meal Program is still alive and well today.
Looking back at it all, it really feels like the universe conspired to make this happen, as if Heaven mandated for things to play out the way they did.
I am getting ahead of the story though, because the 1Meal Program actually began as a thought in 2009 when my mom, my sister and I had dinner in a restaurant in Capetown, South Africa. At the end of a meal my mom normally adds up the bill to make sure nothing is amiss, but she found, to her surprise, that there was an additional charge of 5 South African Rand to our final bill. When she asked the server the reason for this cost, the server gives my mom a small yellow card. On it, humbly written, was the details of a program being implemented in South Africa called the Prince's Trust. It is a fund set up by a local non-profit organization that collects 5 Rand from every diner's bill and uses it to pay for the care of street children in South Africa. My mom was so touched by it and the idea stuck with her all the way back to the Philippines. She has always had a soft spot for less privileged children and although she had already set up an orphanage that houses 40 street children, from abused families, she still felt that she could do more, especially in her home province of Iloilo in the Visayas region of the Philippines. Thus, later that year, she began reaching out to acquaintances she had worked with for a livelihood program in Iloilo and arranged a meeting to discuss with them the possibility of adopting a similar foundation in Iloilo.
The 1Meal Program was launched on March 31, 2011. Their honorary chairwoman, Ballsy Aquino Cruz, accompanied my mom as they held a press launch in Iloilo City together with the founding members of the program. The program hoped to work the same way the Prince's Trust does, wherein 5 Pesos, instead of 5 Rand, would be asked from each diner who attains a bill of 200 Pesos or more. This donation goes directly to the funding of numerous projects, all with the intention of uplifting the education of an impoverished child. Thus the name: 1Meal. For every 1 Meal of a diner in Iloilo, they can give an opportunity to a child in need - and what better opportunity than education, the great equalizer.
It has been almost 6 years since we have launched the 1Meal Program and it has grown so much over the years, from humbly donating slippers and school books, to now hosting over 90 scholarships for college degrees and even returning 15,000 motor boats to fishermen throughout northern Iloilo after they had lost their main source of livelihood to typhoon Yolanda in 2013. Now, as we are about to begin a momentous chapter in the foundation's history, I am creating this website as a way of sharing our story, in the hope that it will inspire somebody else the same way my mom was many years ago by the seedling of hope she found in her bill at the end of one meal.
