NUR-SULTAN – Künde, a social metropolitan café in Nur-Sultan, and Glovo courier service launched a charitable project on Sept. 21 giving people an opportunity to support doctors working in COVID-19 hospitals by ordering them food delivery.
Ahmetov is sure thanks to partnership with Glovo more people will learn about their project and give their support. Photo credit: Facebook account of Künde café.
Every Glovo user can support the project regardless of the location. To help, the user should order food in Künde café and add to the order any amount from 500 tenge (US$1,17). After that, Künde café will collect lunches for hospital doctors and deliver it on behalf of Glovo users.
Künde Cafe, which opened at Nazarbayev University Campus in 2016, hires people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. For now, there are 15 employees, who had been previously registered at the Mental Health Center and underwent training and special labour therapy.
Project founder and Nazarbayev University alumni Maulen Ahmetov has volunteered for over a decade. He communicated with Social Hugs Café in Texas and Training Café in Almaty to understand the specific nature of the work and to create an original experience. He was inspired by their approach and created a similar project with the Mental Development Center in the Kazakh capital.
“Kazakh people are gradually coming to the idea that we should not isolate people with special needs from society and on the contrary, continuous interaction with the world outside will be an effective therapy for these people. The aim of such rehabilitation coincides with our mission – purposefully teach people to live in a society, work, achieve their goals instead of hiding them at home,” he said.
The project founders have been working for five years, but due to the pandemic they faced difficulties as did many other public service establishments. They delivered more than 2,000 free lunches to COVID-19 hospital doctors as part of the “Lunches for Doctors” project in 2020.
