Update from the Chair – November

Dear all,

This is always such an exciting time with Christmas fast approaching. It’s a chance to get together as a community and celebrate all that we’ve achieved throughout the year, while enjoying each other’s company and some fantastic fundraisers that our central office team and army of volunteers across the country have been so busy organising for the charity in recent months.

I’ll be doing everything I can to experience as many of these events and meet as many of you as possible in the coming weeks. But I’d like to say a big thank you to you all for the effort you’ve been putting into bringing these festive events together, which give us such a big opportunity to raise funds for, and awareness of, our incredible cricket programmes.

We’ve made good progress as a charity this year - our programmes continue to grow, and our board of Trustees is in a good place as we all work together to achieve the aims outlined in our strategy over the next few years.

I’m happy to share that over 23,000 young people with a disability and from disadvantaged communities have participated in our cricket programmes this year. Through our work, we strive to make an impact through cricket and what’s most important to us is that we do everything possible to empower the young people engaged in our programmes to fulfil their potential in life, so to hear that we’ve been able to reach more young people than ever before this year is brilliant news.

The increase in this participation number is double what it was last year, and this is mainly due to our delivery of cricket into 400 new special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) schools in partnership with the ECB. This has given us the opportunity to make the game more accessible than ever before for young people with a disability, and by signposting those who take part in cricket through our delivery in SEND schools to our Super 1s programme, we hope we can not just increase access to the game but increase the impact we have on the lives of young people with a disability as well.

As you’re aware, the charity has also been busy working on how we can improve our membership offer in the past six months. Thank you to everyone who took part in the survey we shared with you all, the insight you’ve given us is invaluable and we’re still learning a lot from the data we’ve obtained through the process. Next steps will be communicated with you all soon, but this is just the start of an improved way of working and communicating with all our members and supporters, without whom we wouldn’t be able to achieve what we do as a charity.

I’d like to sign off by saying a big thank you to all our staff and the board of Trustees for all their hard work and support in 2023. There are always challenges to overcome and a lot of hours put in to achieving what we do. There’s been quite a lot of change in a relatively short period this past year, but it’ll all be so worthwhile when all the things we’re talking about currently, come to fruition and help us continue to improve what we do, and how we operate, as a charity. 

I wish you all the happiest of Christmas periods and pass on all my best wishes as we enter the new year.

We look forward to taking the charity forward and working together with you in 2024.

Regards,
Tim