OREANDA-NEWS. June 6, 2011. After becoming title sponsor of the long-term social project Sambo for Kids earlier this year, the lender is now set on putting its weight behind the task of ensuring the regeneration of the patriotic sports movement Young Sambo Wrestler

Uniastrum Bank is funding 17 sambo qualifying tournaments in Russian regions, Olympic-style events for orphans and children deprived of parental care in Ukraine and Armenia, as well as the finals of a competition entitled Young Sambo Wrestler 2011, which will decide the best youth sambo teams in Russia and countries of the former Soviet Union.

In the 1980s, Young Sambo Wrestler was a highly popular sports movement set up by D.L. Rudman, Honored Master of Sport, Honored Coach of the USSR, the world’s first Sambo champion, and founder of the school Sambo-70. Under the auspices of the movement, Sambo clubs from all over the Soviet Union competed for prizes awarded by the Central Committee of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, the newspaper Pionerskaya Pravda, and the National Olympic Committee. Overall, more than 1.5 million teenagers from 600 clubs nationwide fought for a place in the finals. It was in such competitions that many of today’s sports personalities began their careers. Sambo for Kids aims to revive friendly ties between young wrestlers and to encourage youngsters to take up sambo, a sport rooted in national forms of self-defense and combat. The project’s overriding objectives are to infuse children with a spirit of patriotism, inspire them to take up sport as a way of life, promote a healthy lifestyle, and to popularize sambo wrestling as a national sport.

This year Uniastrum Bank is focusing its charitable activities on helping children. In March, for example, Uniastrum and the Bank of Cyprus organized a special charity initiative that enabled families hit by 2010’s wildfires to enjoy an all-expenses-paid stay on Cyprus. As a result some 200 persons, half of them children, holidayed on the island. Uniastrum has for the past four years sat on the Board of Trustees of the Big Break Orphan Education Endowment Fund which helps orphaned youngsters and children’s home leavers obtain a good education and find a place in life.

“Helping children’s sport means first and foremost caring about the health of our children and working to ensure that the new generation grows up to be strong, motivated and successful,” says Uniastrum President Gagik Zakaryan. “For many years now our Bank has been committed to a variety of youth-oriented charitable programs, focusing especially on deprived youngsters”.