Robin Hood Army

Robin Hood Army is a volunteer-driven, zero-funds organisation that collects surplus food from restaurants, bakeries, hotels, and other food establishments and redistributes it to vulnerable populations. It operates every night of the year, with volunteers picking up excess meals at the end of the trading day and delivering them the same evening to people sleeping on the streets, residents of low-income urban settlements, municipal waste collectors, orphanages, and elders' homes. The organisation originated in India in 2014, inspired by a community food-redistribution model from Portugal, and has since expanded to chapters in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka, among other countries. The Sri Lanka chapter was established in Colombo in 2016 and has distributed over 2.2 million meals to date. It previously operated chapters in two other Sri Lankan cities, which have since become inactive due to a shortage of volunteers.

The organisation accepts no financial transactions of any kind. Running costs, including a vehicle used for nightly food collection and distribution, are covered directly by corporate partners who pay suppliers on the organisation's behalf rather than transferring funds to it. Current consistent partners include a solar energy company that funds the vehicle and a bakery chain operating across Colombo. Additional partners have provided food packages for daytime distributions, which supplement the regular nightly drives. The organisation also works with point-of-contact individuals in specific communities to manage distributions in densely populated informal settlements where direct crowd management would be difficult.

Volunteers register through a centralised website, robinhoodarmy.com, and are directed to a city-specific WhatsApp group used for all coordination. A separate check-in portal logs each volunteer's participation and tracks cumulative meals delivered. Volunteers receive downloadable certificates at milestones of 10, 50, and 100 drives, which a number of universities recognise for extracurricular credit. The current active volunteer base in Colombo stands at approximately 25 to 30 people, with around 10 highly regular participants. At the end of each drive, the lead volunteer posts a summary recording the number of meals collected, the partner establishments visited, the distribution locations, and the volunteers present.

The Sri Lanka chapter has faced periods of reduced activity following the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2022 economic crisis, all of which affected both volunteer availability and partner continuity. The organisation has had engagement with the Food and Agriculture Organization regarding food safety standards and has received guidance from the national health authority on food handling practices. It has been featured in international media and was the subject of a case study discussed in connection with a Harvard Business School programme. The organisation works to scale up its volunteer base, reopen chapters in other Sri Lankan cities, and increase the number of day drives by securing additional food partnerships.