April 24, 2021
A woman receives free fruits and vegetables from a community pantry in Quezon City. Photo: Reuters
On April 14, Ana Patricia Non set up a small bamboo cart on a pavement in a Quezon City village, stocking it with 800 pesos (S$22.00) worth of groceries, including vegetables, packs of rice and noodles, canned food, and bottles of water.
The 26-year-old resident attached a handwritten cardboard sign that read “Maginhawa Community Pantry”, after the name of the street, and came with a guideline written in Tagalog: “Give according to your means, take according to your need.”
On Facebook, she shared pictures of the cart and people helping themselves to the community pantry’s contents, and encouraged others to set up their own food banks. “You can do it, just don’t expect anything in return,” Non, a visual communications graduate from the University of the Philippines (UP), said in an interview with local media.