Hunger doesn’t take weekends off, and neither does Iwas Gutom Society. Every Saturday and Sunday, a rotating crew of volunteers across Manila cooks, packs, and hands out meals to anyone who needs one, unhoused folks included, no questions asked.
Iwas Gutom, roughly “avoid hunger,” is about as grassroots as it gets. It’s composed of volunteers who show up on a given weekend, cook, and hand out food to whoever’s hungry, with a particular focus on Manila’s unhoused.
Their own tagline says it best: “Everyone’s a volunteer, everyone’s a beneficiary, everyone gets hungry.”
The kitchen itself runs out of a spot in Santa Cruz, but the food doesn’t stay there. By early evening, one team heads out to deliver snacks around the city, covering various locations such as Lawton, Plaza Ermita, or Plaza Malate, while another group stays behind for dinner service and cleanup.
In September, they celebrated their fourth monthsary. In just those four months, the group has logged 33 community kitchen days and served around 14,475 meals total: 4,774 hot plates and 9,701 of what’s become their signature, a double-decker sandwich, usually paired with juice, bottled water, or iced tea for whoever’s eating at the Santa Cruz HQ kitchen itself.
Over 250 volunteers have cooked or packed a meal with them at some point, from the 25 friends and family who started it all to the newer regulars who kept coming back for more weekends after that.
The menu changes every weekend, too. One Saturday it was ginisang monggo with tinapa and chicharon; the next day, pancit bihon with lumpiang shanghai. Sandwiches rotate just as often, from pulled chicken with cucumber and egg to chicken hotdog and egg, depending on what the kitchen has to work with that weekend.
None of it runs on a payroll. It’s just whoever shows up that weekend, cooking enough food for a few hundred strangers, then doing it all again the next day.
Volunteering runs by appointment, and slots fill up fast, sometimes within hours of opening. Your best bet is to keep checking both their social media and their iVolunteer page, where the next available dates and locations get posted as soon as they open up, or free up, since people drop out too.
