Strategy update from our CEO

Hello everyone,

I am really pleased to say that the Trustee board has approved the first draft of our new strategy. Therefore, we are now running a series of strategy roadshow sessions across the UK which began in Scotland on 23 Feb. We have a few more to go this week including an online session on 8 March for those who cannot join us in person. If you haven’t had a chance to book yet, please do by clicking here.

Our first roadshow session in Scotland was well attended by Scotland Chair, Colin Crichton, his fellow committee members, our Glasgow and Edinburgh Wicketz Development Officers, partners from the People’s Postcode Lottery and our friends at Cricket Scotland, as well as other guests who want to help support our work.

We provided an outline of how our focus for the next 12-18 months will be to better understand and define our impact, which means looking at and evaluating the outcomes that young people achieve as a result of the work that we all collectively undertake to make the Taverners the success that it is.

We also talked about how we are growing and developing our fundraising so that we become less and less reliant on narrow sources of income type, including the events market, and how we are going to take much more advantage of the wealth of opportunities in building partnerships with businesses, trusts and foundations, and many other people and organisations who will all want to help us grow and be more impactful because we can better demonstrate how young people benefit from our cricket programmes.

There was also information shared that outlines some of the significant changes and improvements to the way the staff teams work, the technology we have and the approaches we take. More news on that will follow in the next month or two.

Once we have undertaken a lot of this work in the next 18 months, we are confident it will give us much stronger foundations upon which to accelerate the growth of our cricket programmes for young people who face the challenges of inequality from 2023/24 onwards. We also plan to build on our already very well recognised position as the leading disability cricket charity, by becoming increasingly more recognised as a leader in our field so that we can start to influence government and sports organisations as they seek to increase opportunities for more young people with a disability to enjoy and benefit from cricket, and sport in general.

The national roadshow is a great way to listen and learn for myself and the team too. I thoroughly enjoyed spending more time with everyone in Scotland. Having the chance to listen, learn and better understand what works in different parts of the UK all under the banner of the proud Lord’s Taverners name is a key part of our strategy. Therefore, another area we plan to work hard on is to bring all of the regions much closer together and be better supported by the staff teams. I am thoroughly looking forward to speaking with more people from the Taverners family across the country over the next two weeks to continue to communicate our plans.

Finally, by the end of March our strategy and the business plans that underpin them will be complete and ready to launch this summer ahead of our AGM, where more members can find out about our exciting ambitions as we approach our 75^th anniversary.

A big thanks from me personally to all of you who have engaged in the roadshows and given or will give your time and feedback. It’s great to have so many members and friends of the charity help us shape the future of the Taverners as we strive to ‘Maximise the sport of cricket to empower young people facing inequality to make positive choices, improve their health and wellbeing, and achieve positive outcomes’ - our new mission statement at the heart of our strategy. You heard it here first!

Thanks everyone, look forward to seeing you all soon.

Best,
Mark