Dato Tony Tay

Today, Willing Hearts now cooks seven thousand meals every day, which are delivered to seventy distribution points in Singapore. It operates 365 days a year and has some three hundred regular volunteers, operating out of a facility in a public community center. Their beneficiaries are neglected and abandoned elderly and persons with disabilities, the sick, children of single-parent households, low-income families, and migrant workers.
Supported with donations in cash but mostly in kind, its facility operates daily from 4:30 AM to 3:30 PM as volunteers collect, prepare, cook, pack, and deliver meals in a systematic cycle of work that respects the people they serve by seeing to the quality and quantity of the food, observing food safety, and segregating Muslim and non-Muslim meals. Willing Hearts has not missed a single day of food-giving since it started fourteen years ago.
Willing Hearts has extended its services to optical and dental care, TCM treatments, and bereavement services to its beneficiaries.
What gratifies Tony is how the simple sharing of food has fostered the spirit of volunteerism: taxi drivers have volunteered to deliver food packs; parents bring their children to the group’s kitchen to help; volunteers and their families are nurtured by their Willing Hearts experience in the virtues of service, empathy, and kindness.
Tony participates in all aspects of the work. He often speaks of Willing Hearts as a way of being part of one family, one village—a poignant statement from one who did not have much of a family growing up. He says: “We are just sharing, sharing all that we have in life to make a better society.”
Tony’s vision for Willing Hearts is “Improving the lives of the underprivileged and marginalized by providing them with their “daily bread” and helping them become useful members of our society.”