For Sovcomflot, a priority area for sponsorship activities is assisting the development of children and young people. To this end, the Group supports a diversified roster of organisations, initiatives, and programmes with a social and educational focus.
One such institution is St. Olga´s Children´s Hospital in Saint Petersburg, Russia. For more than a decade, Sovcomflot has been allocating funds to equip the hospital´s intensive care and anaesthesiology ward with state-of-the-art equipment. Thanks to the company's participation, the hospital regularly purchases the most modern and high-tech equipment, one of the first in St. Petersburg to save lives of newborn children. SCF support allows more children to be admitted for treatment every year and significantly reduces the mortality rate. At the moment it is 1%.
Since 2019, Sovcomflot has been providing support to the Safonovo Orphanage in the Smolensk region, helping the staff to create conditions for the children in their care similar to those found in a family, and to prepare the children for living independently. The Group assists in obtaining the equipment necessary for classrooms and accommodation units and helps organise school trips.
In addition, Sovcomflot has facilitated cooperation between the orphanage and the Saint Tikhon Orthodox Humanitarian University, located in Moscow. The university launched a pilot project “Social and teaching assistance and adaptation of orphans and children deprived of parental care” at the orphanage with the help of volunteer students. The university plans to then draw on this experience when working with other social service providers, located in particular in the Arkhangelsk, Murmansk, and Volgograd regions.
Sovcomflot has been developing cooperation with the Youth Maritime League, which allows the League to host large-scale events targeted at children and teenagers, such as the Russian Rally of Young Sailors (May, on the Black Sea coast), and the Young Sailors Rally of the Urals, Siberia and the Russian Far East (September, the Pacific coast). Since the beginning of the cooperation with SCF, over 2,000 young people from 42 regions of Russia have taken part in these events.