Retired HSBC banker embraces role helping teens with Down’s syndrome and other intellectual disabilities in Hong Kong do sports and eat healthy meals

After 36 years at HSBC, Carmel Armstrong is chief operating officer of the Love 21 Foundation, a charity helping teens with intellectual disabilities be active

Its latest initiative is a dragon boat team that has been practising for six weeks ahead of a regatta organised with the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club

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Carmel Armstrong worked for HSBC for 36 years. Today, she is the chief operating officer of the Love 21 Foundation, which is focused on helping people in Hong Kong with Down’s syndrome.

Published: 6:15pm, 24 Sep 2021Updated: 2:22pm, 30 Sep 2021

Kind-hearted may not be the first word that springs to mind when you think of a banker, but Carmel Armstrong proves the exception.

After working for HSBC in Asia for 36 years, Armstrong decided to retire and volunteer for local Hong Kong charities. Through this work, she met Jeff Rotmeyer – and her life suddenly changed.

After he had seen one too many young adults with Down’s syndrome die early, Rotmeyer set up the Love 21 Foundation in the city in 2017. Its mission is to extend the lives of people with this condition and to help others with intellectual disabilities by teaching them and their carers about preparing nutritious, healthy meals, and encouraging them to be physically active through sports programmes.

The Canadian, who is also the founder of ImpactHK, a charity helping the city’s homeless, could see how Armstrong’s years of experience and many contacts in Hong Kong could prove useful. In March, she became Love 21’s chief operating officer.

Love 21 members take part in a variety of activities at its centre in Diamond Hill, Kowloon.

Boxing training helps improve members’ fitness levels at Love 21.

It’s fair to say she finds her work a little more fulfilling now than in her three decades in the world of international finance. “I used to go to work for a bonus. Now I go for hugs and kisses – and I get a lot of them,” she says. “When I began working for Love 21, I immediately knew I’d found my home and what 36 years in HSBC had been leading up to. It was all a training programme for this.