Charles J de Guara

Charles cares about individuality, self-expression, and people forming meaningful connections. His stance on individuality goes beyond a person’s right to embrace and define their own identity; he advocates against minimizing individuals through the applications of labels such as race, gender, faith, ethnicity or any other label that when used exclusively to describe an individual rob them of their unique identity. “It is one thing to describe a person’s attributes and it is quite another thing to minimize a person’s identity to a single attribute.” A Basque-Maltese-American, he proudly descends on his father's side from the same ancestry as Don Hernando de Guevara who sailed west with Christopher Columbus and married the Taino princess Higuenamota. His great grandmother Anna Pace on the other hand a cousin of Giovanni Pace, whom adopted the English name John Pass his name can be found on Liberty Bell in Pennsylvania. As First WHOist & CEO of GTK® he is dedicated to Getting To Know others and their stories. Basque Explorers With Columbus

Charles started his journey in a family-owned food manufacturing business working in Sales & Marketing from 2002 to 2005, always drawn to business he owned and operated several micro-businesses and side hustles while exploring a career in IT. In 2009 he left his role as a Microsoft OEM Licensing Representative to establish what would later become the IPOP Network, a media and marketing business. He co-produced and hosted the TV Show TekTiek, a 13-episode series focused on Technology that aired on National TV in Malta, Europe. At IPOP Network he was the Editor-in-chief of multiple niche publications covering a broad array of topics including Local Businesses, Destinations, Fertility, Animals, and Authors. Today he is dedicated exclusively to his vision for GTK™ & GTKME®.

Charles has studied the long and sometimes fragmented history of the de Guevara family in Malta. Its Maltese story begins during the expansion of the Crown of Aragon into the central Mediterranean, when members of the powerful Vélez de Guevara family served King Alfonso V in the conquest and government of his Italian possessions. In the fifteenth century, the family acquired important rights and offices in Malta, including the Castellania and Secrezia of Malta and Gozo, placing the Guevaras among the Crown’s principal representatives on the islands. Their presence did not end with those early offices. Members and descendants of the wider family appear in Maltese and Gozitan records through appointments, property, marriages and connections with other established families. The name is also preserved visibly within St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta, where the elaborate marble tombstone of Frà Don Didaco Vélez de Guevara, a knight of the Order of St John, lies in the main nave. Charles continues to gather and interpret these traces including references associated with the Order of Malta in Gozo, family marriages and the later forms of the surname to better understand how the medieval de Guevara presence became part of Malta’s own history. To this day the de Guevara (now syncopated to De Guara), family is still present on the island and many hold notable positions in government.

Having worked in the memorial industry for many years, I’ve generally found that what people want to know most after losing someone is that you are grieving the loss also. Not that you have found the perfect words. Not that you can somehow make sense of what happened. Not even that you know exactly how they feel. They want to know that the person they loved mattered to you too. That is why platitudes, however well intended, so often fall short. “Sorry for your loss,” “thinking of you,” “they’re in a better place” — there is nothing inherently wrong with those words, but they rarely have much altitude or depth. They acknowledge the loss without necessarily acknowledging the person. After expressing your own sadness, I think one of the most meaningful things you can offer is a shared memory. Tell the family something you remember. Tell them who that person was to you. Tell them what made them funny, difficult, generous, stubborn, kind, brilliant, ridiculous or unforgettable. Tell them something they may already know, or better still, something they may never have known at all. Express an understanding of who the person was and, in your own small way, what the world has lost by losing them. But more importantly, bring them back to life for a moment in memory. That, to me, is where real comfort often lives. Not in pretending the loss is somehow okay, but in proving that the life existed beyond the walls of one family. That other people saw them. Knew them. Remember things about them. Because grief is painful enough without the fear that someone might slowly disappear from the world as well. Sometimes the greatest thing you can give someone who is grieving is the reassurance that the person they loved was known and will be remembered.