PRESS RELEASE – The Advancement of Children Foundation (ACF) in St. Kitts received a significant donation of US$125,000 from funds raised through Cable and Wireless’ Annual Charity Golf Event.

ACF now joins other organizations including the SOS Children’s Village in Jamaica, the Sunshine Achievement Center for under-privileged children Barbados, the Rainbow Rescue team in Trinidad, orphanages in Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, and the Wilhelmina Fonds Breast Cancer Center in Curacao, who have benefitted from the event.

“Together with our partners, we are extremely pleased to support the Advancement of Children Foundation as this year’s Tournament Charity”, said John Reid, the President of C&W’s Consumer Group, and the organizer of the event.  “This donation is a continuation of a tradition that we started nine years ago in Trinidad and Tobago, where we combined our golf tournament with a social development and charity focus”.

According to Reid, C&W has always been committed to giving back to the countries in which they operate. “We engage in a variety of community development projects across the region to positively affect the communities we serve, and often our employees are front and centre with any CSR initiative. As part of this commitment, we leverage our strong partnerships to help strengthen our programs for social investments. It was a natural step for us to introduce a Golf charity event, where together with our technology, systems and programming partners, we developed another avenue for investing in the community.”

Naeemah Hazelle, Director of the ACF, stated that her team was very grateful for the support from C&W and Friends. “The significant donation will go a very long way in helping to implement initiatives that will change the lives of children and communities across both islands”. ACF was founded eight years ago in response to the island-wide gang violence, and is run by a voluntary board who help citizens develop and implement projects to improve the conditions and opportunities of youth. The Foundation supports five local projects per year.

The donations from C&W and friends will be used to support these projects, as well as start an island-wide literacy program, called Caribbean Reads, in seventeen primary schools across the country. The program will include free books for children, a training component, and a dedicated library in each school. A second project is geared at supporting a life skills centre, a safe space for interaction, counseling and life skill development for vulnerable groups.

Reid thanked partners such as HBO-LA, Discovery, Ericsson, Huawei, Anixter and Elemental Technologies for their support in helping the Company carry out this important CSR work in the Caribbean. The tournament brought together over 40 companies that included content and technology partners from the US, Latin America, Canada, UK and the Caribbean.