Kishin Alwani Foundation donates £5,100 to charity

The Kishin Alwani Foundation donated a total of £5,100 to three different charities on the Rock on Tuesday afternoon at Little Bay restaurant.

The restaurant, inspired by Mr Alwani, also donated a total of £750 to the same charities.

Representatives from The Nautilus Project, The Happiness Foundation Gibraltar and Clubhouse Gibraltar gathered at the restaurant in Ocean Village for a cheque presentation by Mr Alwani and for drinks and nibbles supplied by Little Bay.

Presenting each cheque to the individual charities, Mr Alwani thanked them personally for all the work they do in their targeted area.

“I have been donating to different charities for many years,” he later told the Chronicle.

“We have a shop in John Mackintosh Square where we get the public to donate to us their unused clothes and those clothes are sold by the volunteers in our shop and then they are bought by the public.”

“I want to thank the public for donating the clothes and buying back from us.”

“All that money we get we give back to different charities.”

“This time we decided that these three charities are doing very good service to Gibraltar and therefore we wanted to support them.”

“But at the same time Little Bay decided a few months ago to do something for these three charities which was postponed due to the pandemic.”

“So I decided to step in and help these three charities,” he added.

He also noted that it gave him great pleasure to give back to the community and stated, “in order to get great pleasure I need to do service.”

Accepting the cheques on behalf of Clubhouse Gibraltar was Emily Adamberry Olivero who explained that the money would go towards the charity’s employment programme.

“It is very much appreciated for our ongoing work. Because we are as limited or as large as our resources especially the financial ones. And, this will help our employment programme,” she said.

“We are providing placements within society and we support the smaller organisations that can’t afford to pay for the wages so Clubhouse subsides and helps with the funding.”

“We would appreciate organisations providing training places so that people can use it as a stepping stone for further employment and to update their CVs and their confidence and to get back into the world of work. As we always say employment is key to recovery from mental health issues,” she added.

Accepting the cheques on behalf of The Happiness Foundation Gibraltar was Anne Marie Morello who said receiving the cheques was really welcomed by the charity.

“We are going to be using the funds for one of our school projects called Kindness Warriors,” she said.

“We are aiming to run the programme across all schools in Gibraltar and the idea is as the name suggests is to instil and promote the values of kindness, compassion and tolerance.”

“We will also be teaching personal leadership skills and teaching them how to build their resilience by teaching them how to self regulate.” Explaining what this means she said that it teaches children how to work with their nervous system in a way that allows them to access a state of calm, to teach them how to respond to triggers in their environments and events or other stresses.

“To shed that behaviour so they can bring it back to kindness and tolerance,” she said.

“It is really powerful.”

Lewis Stagnetto from the Nautilus Project explained what the money the charity received would go towards.

“We are running low on supplies for the Med Ocean Heroes programme and this is an important interaction programme we have with schoolchildren,” he said.

“Where if they get involved with one of our cleans or they clean up sporadically what happens is we get a photograph sent in, we post it on social media and then when we go to the school we actually present them with a certificate and a cap or a t-shirt in order to promote them in front of their friends.”

“What we are trying to do is encourage this behaviour so that they do it innately without having to be told.”

He added that the programme is very popular and that loads of children have joined over the years that they have been doing it and that its popularity has not waned.