Crysbro & NOCSL launch ‘NextOlympicHope’: Sri Lanka’s first digital funding portal for sports

Further affirming its commitment to empowering and uplifting Sri Lankan athletic talent, the country’s largest poultry company Crysbro joins forces with the National Olympic Committee of Sri Lanka (NOCSL) to launch www.NextOlympicHope.com, a novel digital funding portal that enables the public to financially sponsor rural athletes, school sports associations, and sports clubs and chambers across the island. All funds collected through this portal will be fully disbursed in an entirely transparent manner to the entities there were contributed, a process carefully overlooked, and strictly overseen by the Technical Committee of the NOCSL.

“We are deeply honoured to partner with the National Olympic Committee of Sri Lanka to introduce this powerful and disruptive tool to the Sri Lankan sports landscape. It gives us the opportunity to open multiple new avenues of success to help embolden and foster our country’s athletic talent and help them draw much closer to securing international wins. The requests published on the portal are pre-reviewed thoroughly, and can range from sponsoring a pair of new shoes for a needy athlete with potential to secure international victories or contributing towards a new sports complex at a rural school unable to provide this facility to their children. At the end of the day, our principle goal for this initiative is to ensure that the overall sporting potential of Sri Lanka is enhanced and elevated to Olympian levels by reducing some of the financial burden that can often create great barriers to achievement.” Crysbro Senior Marketing Manager Amores Sellar stated.

The NextOlympicHope portal is a comprehensive and fully secured, state-of-the-art portal, maintained by the NOCSL. All requests for funding are submitted by regional sports associations and individual athletes, and are thoroughly reviewed and prioritized by the NOCSL Technical Committee. Members of the public who wish to support these endeavours can do so through online payments, and keep track of the progress of each project.

The platform also offers up-to-date information about each athlete as well; complete profile, performance statistics, wins and details of future competitions. Additionally, it reports on the latest news and advancements from the Sri Lankan sports industry.

The ‘NOCSL-CRYSBRO Next Champ’ scholarship programme is phase-II of Crysbro’s ‘Next Champ’ scholarship programme, which up to date has groomed and supported the dreams of 130 young athletes from the under-privileged regions of the country. The initiative has also successfully produced a collection of athletes who secured gold and silver medals at the recent South Asian Games in Nepal.

Crysbro Next Champ not only recognises and rewards young sporting talent from all corners of the country, but also budding athletes from multiple sporting disciplines with guidance from experts on aspects such as proper training methods and a suitable diet. The project’s founding vision sought to bolster Crysbro’s already significant social contribution as a key pillar of the country’s rural economy by creating sporting opportunities and promoting the message of staying physically and mentally active.

As the apex body presiding over the national sports agenda, NOCSL is solely responsible for the country’s representation at Commonwealth Games and the country’s development of high performance sport.

Established in 1972 with just 100 chicks and a deep desire to be a market leader in quality and innovation, Crysbro has emerged as Sri Lanka’s first and most sophisticated, fully vertically-integrated poultry producer. Its operations span grandparent and parent farms, hatcheries, broiler farms and feed mills. This thriving ‘Farm-to-Fork’ concept has formed the core of its success. In turn, it has yielded unprecedented benefit for numerous stakeholders including direct and indirect employees, outgrowers, domestic maize farmers and ultimately Sri Lankan consumers. These local links have immeasurably aided domestic production and led to a reduction in reliance on imported poultry products.