The Born This Way Foundation's co-founder Cynthia Germanotta teamed up with champagne Maison Dom P&eacute;rignon for a charity dinner honoring the generosity of spirit for which she and her daughter strive every day.

As the mother of one of the world's biggest stars, Cynthia Germanotta knows what it takes to be a star. And while her daughter <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/lady-gaga-style-evolution-red-carpet" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lady Gaga</a>&mdash;who Germanotta calls Steffy&mdash;couldn't attend the <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/pop-culture/lady-gaga-dom-perignon-champagne-collaboration" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dom P&eacute;rignon</a> x&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/lady-gaga-versace-born-this-way-pride-month-2021-collection" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Born This Way Foundation</a> dinner at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for World Kindness Day on Saturday, the stars were certainly out.&nbsp;
The evening's cocktail party and subsequent dinner party were in celebration of Gaga's ongoing partnership with the historic champagne Maison including the limited-edition bottles of Dom P&eacute;rignon 2010 Blanc and Dom P&eacute;rignon 2006 Ros&eacute; created by the <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/film-tv/lady-gaga-jared-leto-salma-hayek-house-of-gucci-red-carpet-premiere-fashion-style" target="_blank" rel="noopener">House of Gucci </a>star as well as her <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/art/lady-gaga-selling-champagne-sculptures" target="_blank" rel="noopener">limited-edition sculpture series</a> with the brand. As the co-founder of the BTWF, Germanotta announced at dinner that the first sculpture in the series had been sold in a charity auction for $570,000, all of which will go to the organization's programs dedicated to improving and destigmatizing youth mental health.

There to support the BTWF's message, the event was packed with some of today's biggest celebrities like Amanda Seyfried, Billy Porter, Pom Klementieff, <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/film-tv/gossip-girl-reboot-part-2-trailer-thanksgiving-day-release-hbo-max" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Evan Mock</a>, <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/film-tv/balmain-collaborates-channel-4-fracture-drama-series" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Tommy Dorfman</a>, <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/politics-culture/indya-moore-trans-activism-style" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Indya Moore</a>, <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/french-girls-instagram-fashion-follow" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Cindy Bruna</a>, Ella Hunt, <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/men/queer-eye-antoni-porowski-fashion-j-brand-justin-theroux-kevin-harrington" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Antoni Porowski</a>, <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/helena-christensen-pandora-mothers-day" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Helena Christensen</a>, Joshua Jackson, <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/brandon-blackwood-bags-end-systemic-racism-tote" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Brandon Blackwood</a>, Sophie Auster, Derek Lam, Jan Schlottman, Jill and Harry Kargman, Char de Francesco, <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/pop-culture/celebrities-caught-canoodling-on-boats-harry-styles-olivia-wilde" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Stella Maxwell</a>, Thomas Hayo, Stephanie Goto,&nbsp;and more. 
Prior to the evening's festivities, L'OFFICIEL sat down with Germanotta in her suite at the Baccarat Hotel to discuss the exciting work her organization is doing to improve mental health in young people and how we can all be a little kinder.

L&rsquo;OFFICIEL: This dinner is in honor of World Kindness Day. How are you celebrating that this year?
Cynthia Germanotta: Personally, I&rsquo;m excited that today is World Kindness Day, but honestly, I want it to be every day. I feel grateful and privileged to be able to do that every day at Born This Way Foundation, its work towards building a kinder, braver world&mdash;understanding how kindness changes young people&rsquo;s lives and everybody&rsquo;s lives and develops better communities. So we&rsquo;re celebrating it all year through all kinds of campaigns that build community, that help young people with peer-to-peer support, that do a lot of research. But today, in particular, there are so many events going on, and one of the ones really near and dear to my heart today is this partnership that we have with Dom P&eacute;rignon and the celebration of that, and coming together around what I would say is both kindness and generosity. It really started and was born out of, of course, a creative spirit and creating something incredible and beautiful and never giving up on that vision. But at the heart of it is also giving that back&mdash;taking that beauty, taking that creativity, and giving back and doing good. 
L&rsquo;O: What does it mean to you or to the foundation to have Dom P&eacute;rignon&rsquo;s support? How did the foundation and Dom get involved?
CG: To have Dom involved is an incredible validation of the work and will honestly help us for many years to come continue to build that kinder and braver world and the origin was really just all around that is creating creativity coming together to collaborate to develop something exciting and not give up on that vision and radically accept where that takes you and that was really the spirit coupled with that the generosity and spirit of giving back which sometimes can seem like an unlikely pairing at some times but kindness and generosity are a unifier and has brought us all together to this moment.&nbsp;

L&rsquo;O: You co-founded the foundation with your daughter. What inspired the two of you to start this foundation?
CG: It was really born out of the struggle she had growing up and her desire to help other young people be better equipped to deal with their own. And because that affected her so profoundly, like her mental health, it&rsquo;s part of her journey and continues to be part of her journey, following her all the way through, it&rsquo;s something she started talking about to young people and we learned the power of storytelling. 
When she shared her story, other people felt empowered and inspired. They wanted to understand how she was able to overcome her struggles, and the other thing that led to it was hearing stories from young people all over the world that had similar issues. The more we heard of it, and the more we saw their desire to get involved and change things and make a difference, we realized the enormity of this issue. It was a movement and a beautiful relationship before it became a foundation, but of course, there was a moment where she said, &ldquo;We really need to formalize this, and my vision is to empower and inspire young people to build a kinder, braver world.&rdquo; She really believed the heart of that was connecting kindness to mental health. We call it this inextricable link, and that&rsquo;s what we set out to do, but being sure that young people were at the heart of it and driving the work that we do. That was really the genesis of it. It&rsquo;s all her. I just feel, as Mom, that I have the honor and privilege of executing on this beautiful vision and I&rsquo;m really grateful to do it with an incredible team at Born This Way Foundation, and with partners like Dom P&eacute;rignon. 
Helping people is all of our issues; one person, one organization can&rsquo;t do it, so it was important to us to have wonderful collaborations like this and it&rsquo;s a real testimony to their commitment as well to a kinder, braver world and to generosity and hope, never giving up.

L&rsquo;O: The foundation works with so many amazing advocacy and outreach programs &mdash; can you talk about some of the real-life instances of change, progress, or kindness that you&rsquo;ve seen throughout your time working with the foundation?
CG: There&rsquo;s a few, and they're probably best demonstrated through some of our programs because we use research and our conversations with young people to really understand what they need, and then we try to be there for them and support them and provide a safe space environment where we can fill that. Through the kindness campaigns, the change that we&rsquo;ve seen has been seeing young people embrace kindness. This is a very aspirational generation that wants to do good and make a difference in their communities, and we&rsquo;ve created campaigns and platforms for them to do that, campaigns for them to practice kindness both to others and to themselves. 
One of the profound things that impacted me through our Be Kind campaign was, we had a young woman who chose to not harm herself for 21 days. So kindness, we saw it show up in all different ways and shapes and forms. It&rsquo;s not just saying, &ldquo;Hi, how are you?&rdquo; or buying somebody a cup of coffee. In that case, somebody not harming themselves was incredibly profound and impactful.
I think the others were a lot of the peer to peer support education that we&rsquo;ve developed, something called Teen Mental Health First Aid, <a href="http://bethere.org">bethere.org</a> training teaches young people how to have healthy and open conversations about mental health and help somebody in a crisis situation, ask the right questions, be there for them, listen, get them connected to the resources and support.
It&rsquo;s not only a collective effort to build that kind of community, but young people are finding community with one another and doing these incredible acts of kindness. We&rsquo;ve learned coming out of the pandemic, we need to study how kindness is action. We&rsquo;ve learned that people don't feel that kindness is being nice, they feel that it&rsquo;s taking an action and actually doing something about it, and they see it as a path forward.
My daughter talks about kindness being a currency that we all have and we should spend on one another, and that the act itself is free but it's priceless. I like to say it's very underestimated but it can make a difference in somebody&rsquo;s day, or even, say, their life.

L&rsquo;O: What's been the most gratifying part of working with Born This Way Foundation?
CG: There have been a couple of things for me. My history, I&rsquo;m first and foremost a mom. I worked in the corporate world but I did not really know the philanthropic space, so that&rsquo;s something I had to learn. But what I feel I was able to bring to the table is the viewpoint of a mother, a viewpoint of a parent that has been through this. So the most gratifying to me is to be able to work with my daughter and my family around this, but also to work with young people and other people and just see the incredible brilliance and genius and resilience and all the good things that they're doing in their community. We&rsquo;re almost 10 years old now, the foundation, and to build a team that brought us to this team that cares so deeply about our work and incredible partners that help us scale this mission, it&rsquo;s very very gratifying. Most of all is the hope that I see that young people have for a kinder, braver world and for a better future.&nbsp; 
L&rsquo;O: You recently released a short film &ldquo;The Power of Kindness.&rdquo; Can you tell me a little bit about it? 
CG: It was my daughter&rsquo;s inspiration. We care a lot about the stigma that still surrounds mental health and the ability to talk about it, so this is about creating a safe space to model healthy conversations and to start talking about it, and that's what &lsquo;The Power of Kindness&rsquo; is all about, coupled with this inextricable link that we know exists between kindness and the outcome and your mental health and that's what really inspired the coming together. It's so beautifully done. It&rsquo;s my daughter, a group of young people, and also an incredible psychiatrist Dr. Alfie, who sat down together. And these young people were incredibly brave to share their stories. You know, I said to them a couple of days ago, quite often my daughter is talking about this alone, so to be able to do it in a group that can share that bond, start that conversation, and carry it forward, and that's what we&rsquo;re hoping, is that people do carry it forward, see that it's ok to have these conversations and also from that, connect them to resources if they need it. it's a beautiful piece and I hope a lot of people get to see it.&nbsp;

L&rsquo;O: What is one way that someone can practice kindness every day?
CG: It's the small acts that add up. It&rsquo;s everything from checking in on people, staying connected. I think the biggest thing we lost over the past couple of months was a sense of connection and also a loss of control over our life and sense of routine, so I think checking in, we&rsquo;ve seen how powerful it's been during the pandemic to do simple things. We&rsquo;ve had people writing letters to frontline workers, thanking teachers for things they&rsquo;ve done, and just making small lists that can really go a long way, believe it or not. If you have one person in your life that cares about you and talks to you, it can make such a huge difference. So don&rsquo;t think you have to start on this great big scale. Of course, there's volunteering and all of those many things. The key thing, and our Be Kind campaign really demonstrates this, is to try doing it for 21 days in a row. We call it building your kindness muscle and integrating it in your daily life, and that's what I try to do, and I try to do it through really small acts that add up and thinking outside yourself as well. Nothing like changing your day than doing it for someone else.&nbsp;

Lady Gaga's Mother Cynthia Germanotta Celebrated World Kindness Day with Dom Pérignon

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