Food Banks

While our daily meals offer support across the entire student population at the rural schools where we work, additional food banks have been developed with a laser focus on those living in the direst food insecurity amid the most fragile family situations. The following initiatives are seeing great success in keeping students in class and on track for meaningful opportunities beyond school. Altogether, our food banks reach more than 180 student recipients every year, while also benefiting close to 400 extra family members. 

Knar food bank

Our first food bank was established in 2017, when we started noticing some of the most fragile members of the community were going across the border to work in Thailand illegally. This would involve the parents being away for months on end and usually leaving their children in the care of an elderly grandma: the children could not take care of her, and she could not take care of them. This is the perfect storm in which children can be trafficked, sold off to dodgy orphanages, or, at the very least, be removed from school and put to labor. In an effort to prevent those things from happening and ease the suffering of these families, we put in a Food Bank in the village to replace the “income” that a working 10-year-old might bring into the family – putting forth food in exchange for school attendance. The program continues to bring good results and keeps scores of children in school. 

Urban food bank

In 2014, we also extended this food relief program to the city as part of our urban wellness program. Siem Reap’s urban poor have usually migrated from the countryside in search for work and suffer additional challenges as a result, uprooted from their extended support networks and with no land to plant their own vegetables. Often, children are sent away from their family home to stay with a distant relative so that they have better chances of finishing school, which creates an extra burden on the host family. Offering food bank assistance to PLF Scholarship students means they don’t have to sacrifice study for labor and can fully concentrate on their education. 

Watch the video to meet one recipient 🙂

Chreav food bank

Our newest food bank was born out of a humanitarian response to the Covid lockdowns in 2021 – which risked some of the most marginalised families on the outskirts of Siem Reap being plummeted into starvation. The same socio-economic challenges are at play here as in Knar, with children often left in the care of elderly relatives who are doing their best to hold the family together, making their situations desperately precarious. This initiative supports more than 120 families who, in addition to monthly food drops also receive vegetables seeds so that they can sustainably produce their own healthy and nutritious food. Since schools re-opened after the pandemic, this initiative has been fully aligned with PLF’s mission, supporting these children to go to school in exchange for ongoing food relief for their families. 

Watch the video to meet one family 🙂

University food bank

The majority of PLF students heading to university must relocate from home in order to do so – living alone and away from their families for the first time. We give these students $70 per month as a living stipend, with an agreement from their family that they will contribute an extra $30 in cash or rice, which ensures the family are committed to their child completing university and so that the student can make ends meet. Most families can usually do that as their child is no longer an overhead at home. Then, in Years 3 and 4 of their degree, students are usually qualified enough in the field they are studying to find part time work related to their subject, and their lives suddenly become more manageable – for them, for us and for their families. But in the interim of those first two years, this stipend is a crucial stop gap. 

In the past, there have been students coming from families who could in no way give this support, and we sometimes had to deny our poorest students scholarships, which goes against the grain of our mission. Since a donor came to the rescue with an annual fund that enabled the creation of the University Food Bank, we have been able to support these students for sporadic periods to cover the shortfalls their parents cannot make up. This in turn means that we can focus on students’ academic ability and level of grit and determination to study, rather than the economic restrictions that had previously created obstructions to them receiving scholarships.