Care Through Meals is a social impact program created as a part of Millennium Fellowship 2025 and is intended to achieve the goal of opposing hunger and emotional neglect among the elderly in old age homes in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The project was established after the premise that nutritious food and human connection are essential rights and not privileges and the lack of geriartic care in our community.

The initiative also has been based on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 2: Zero Hunger and SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being because of the frequent lack of food security and emotional support by the widowed and abandoned elderly people. Every meal delivery will be accompanied by personal interaction, where volunteers will have an opportunity to interact with the residents, listening to them, talking to them, and making them feel like a part of the family.

The project is a hybrid of both direct action and sustainability. Care Through Meals encourages constant interaction by partnering with the community and small donations. To facilitate funds transfer and sustainability of the program, a digital donation platform called Connect Hands is being developed to allow providing effective funding and further continuity of the program even after the fellowship.

Our group had made a field visit to an old age home called Apon Old Age Home. Through this visit, we were also involved in the preparation and distribution of meals and eventually we fed 120+ elderly residents. We also collaborated with a local foundation to recruit volunteers for the smooth execution of the visit. Such practical experience enabled us to personally observe the overwhelming necessity of constant assistance in such organizations and reinforced the importance to increase the scale of our project.

As part of our visit, we got to learn that most of the women in the place do not have any family member who can take care of them. Their stories highlighted deeply rooted social issues: abandonment, widowhood and lack of effective social safety net. What was even more alarming was the fact that the home is not supported by the government at all- it is completely privately funded and therefore it has a significant risk of being vulnerable to financial instability.

This raises a larger issue that demands attention: Bangladesh's aging population is not small, yet geriatric care remains one of the most overlooked and underfunded sectors. With the help of our project, we believe we will be able to create significant awareness of the situation of elderly women in privately funded or overall old age homes and make the youth interested in improving their living conditions.

In order to achieve long-term sustainability, we will partner with our university and create the structured volunteering program according to which the Residential Semester (RS) students will be able to engage in geriatric service, meal delivery, companionship programs, and health awareness campaigns. This would not only ensure availability of manpower and continuity, but also inculcate empathy and civic sense in university students.

We have been able to feed more than 120 people through our community efforts and collaborations and we expect to increase to a large number in the next months. Care Through Meals is the start of a larger trend of making the elderly feel dignified, compassionate, and visible again because they are often forgotten.

With this program, we are trying to create a culture of care and empathy among youth volunteers because we want to show them that social change is in the very simplest of gestures. All these communal meals are an expression of the dignity that has been rebuilt, a connection that is cemented, and a reminder that development should also be something that feeds the soul.