8 April 2020 – Heineken Malaysia Berhad (HEINEKEN Malaysia) has been supporting its local communities and is committed to donating basic food items to 3,120 B40 community members to enable them to prepare 80,000 meals over 30 days, with the aim of helping vulnerable families cope with the loss of income during the Movement Control Order (MCO).
The community outreach programme started on 26 March and will continue until 30 April 2020. This will provide support to vulnerable groups in the areas of Desa Mentari, Bestari Jaya and Hulu Langat, communities around the brewery and watershed area. The beneficiaries are made up of Malaysians of all ethnic groups who are most affected by the current situation particularly daily or minimum wage earners earning between RM600 to RM2,000 per month who have to support from 3 to 12 family members.
Roland Bala, Managing Director of HEINEKEN Malaysia said, “People are at the heart of our company. Besides looking after our employees’ wellbeing, we have been reaching out to communities in need around our brewery to support them. We understand the sudden transition that these families have had to go through during this unprecedented situation, so we want to ease their burden by providing basic food necessities.”
The first phase of HEINEKEN Malaysia’s relief efforts saw 120 families from the B40 communities around its Sungei Way Brewery and watershed area in Sungai Selangor, mainly Bestari Jaya and Hulu Langat, benefit from basic food items such as rice, cooking oil, eggs, biscuits, flour and hot drinks powder.
For the second phase, HEINEKEN Malaysia partnered with MyKasih Foundation, a charity organisation in charge of driving welfare distribution to underprivileged families and community leaders. Funds for the beneficiaries are channeled directly into their MyKad to be used at selected supermarkets. Through this arrangement, each beneficiary will get to purchase 10 categories of food items for the next month, which includes rice, infant formula, canned food such as sardines and tuna, eggs, cooking oil, and biscuits.
Mr Arulmani a/l Kaniappan, Joint Management Board Block 1 Desa Mentari Community Leader, added, “At Desa Mentari, many of us are severely impacted by the MCO as we live on a day-to-day basis. Our community is quite large, a lot with big families, so although we try to support each other as much as we can, it is really heartwarming to have HEINEKEN Malaysia step in and offer us so much. We are grateful for the help we have received as every bit counts.”
HEINEKEN Malaysia has provided aid to 725 families to date. The community aid programme is one of the initiatives that has been identified to address an urgent need amongst the B40 communities. The Company is in the process of identifying other programmes and opportunities to overcome the evolving and emerging challenges in relation to COVID-19.
MyKasih Foundation Chairman and Co-Founder, Tan Sri Dr Ngau Boon Keat said, “We applaud HEINEKEN Malaysia’s efforts in reaching out to the less fortunate during this time. We are happy to have enabled this outreach effort though the use of our unique cashless distribution system. By using this solution, there is no need for volunteers to pack and distribute food during the MCO. We would be delighted to assist any organisation that would like to emulate HEINEKEN Malaysia’s initiative in using the cashless MyKad platform to render assistance to the poor.”
