Ichiban Karate Leeds - World Championships

We are Ichiban Karate Club and we’re searching for sponsorship to help get our team of young excellent karateka to the 2022 Karate World Championships in Fort Lauderdale, USA in June 2022.

Ichiban Karate Club is headquartered in Meanwood, Leeds and facilitates karate classes in Meanwood and Gipton. The majority of the club’s members are children from some of the most socio-economically disadvantaged areas of Leeds. As a club, together with Ichiban Dojo, we aim to provide high quality karate instruction at affordable rates for all.

Ichiban Karate provides classes in two locations in Leeds, the Henry Barran Centre, Gipton and Ichiban Dojo, Meanwood Road. The classes offered in Gipton, are in partnership with the charity Gipton Together. Gipton Together aims to provide the youth of Harehills, Gipton and Chapeltown, some of the most economically deprived areas in Leeds, with affordable after school activities to prevent the youth from joining local gangs. All classes at Gipton Together are offered for just £1 a session. 80% of our competitive squad come from the Gipton Together sessions. Across our two teaching venues, we have over 100 students, 98% of which are under the age of 16 approximately, 60% male, 40% female.

As a club we've been competing for 4 years and on average the squad attends external 10 competitions a year, mostly in the North of England. In the 12 months prior to Covid lockdowns, the squad started to come into their own and achieved national level medal positions and excellent results at all other competitions.

Following the easing of lockdown restrictions, the team have returned with renewed vigour and are now targeting the WUKF 2022 Karate World Championships, to be held in Fort Lauderdale, USA on the 23-26 June. Attending these championships will simply not be possible without significant corporate sponsorship and our local fundraising efforts.

We anticipate that 6-8 members of our squad will be eligible and will qualify to attend the championships in June and would need to be accompanied by a minimum of 2 coaches and 3 adult chaperones.
The children in our squad are talented, hardworking individuals with real prospects of winning medals at the Championships. Just qualifying and attending the competition will be a completely eye-opening and potentially life-changing event for each of the children, however, coming from largely 1st generation immigrant families and living in some of the most disadvantaged areas of Leeds, they cannot afford to attend without assistance. These children are motivated to commit to the training required to do well at the competition and are extremely excited to have the opportunity to represent the UK at such a prestigious international event!

By supporting the squad, you’ll be playing a huge role in not only helping these children achieve one of their dreams, but also potentially have long lasting impacts on their future. By being able to add to their CV’s that they qualified and attended, and potentially won a medal at such an event, this significantly improves their chances of university entrance and scholarships.