The Club Cricket Conference Yearbook 2020

- 52 - The Club Cricket Charity Raising Money for the Amateur Game 2019 was a pivotal year in the activities of The Club Cricket Charity: as a recognised partner of the National Cricket Conference and the England and Wales Cricket Board, we consolidated our position as the go-to organisation to ensure that projects within the club cricket environment can be achieved. We have not only talked the talk – we have walked the walk! Our activities in the provision, supply, training and distribution of portable defibrillators has ensured at least three saved lives to our knowledge. There are over 160 clubs in the UK with trained Defib personnel who can save lives! The England and Wales Cricket Foundation has seen fit to provide us with a further grant of £200,000 to ensure that clubs around the country can protect their players, members, spectators and even local communities, to an unprecedented degree. In this one field we have reached into the depths of the grass roots of cricket teams and clubs to an extraordinary level. We have proved to the ECB, in our role with NCC, that we are organisations available to them to complement their efforts with the County Boards in their facilities management which they probably hitherto had not realised. One of the aims of the NCC is to provide the ECB with direct contact with hard- to-reach cricket groups and we, as the Charity, are in a unique position to help NCC in this regard. The 2020/21 strategy of ECB’s facilities group is going to be based on health, safety and security at all levels from the elite sector all the way down to the teams changing under trees on a Wednesday evening. Specifically, the ECB is in a consultation process, the culmination of which will mean that all clubs in their orbit will be registered against a set of criteria conforming to health, safety and security. In other words, the emphasis and the rewards for compliance will depend on welfare. This could include, as an example, free liability insurance. All this has relevance to our work with the Defib project. With our experience and knowledge from our Defib efforts, we can be of huge help to the NCC in their work with ECB. In our quest to cover the needs of amateur cricket we have become involved with the embryonic Wandering Cricket Association. Within their data and knowledge, they cover a huge amount of untapped cricket resource based on the traditional and timeless game which we have lost over the years. Your Trustees have decided to help this new, but potentially important, amateur cricket association with their work and will be contributing from our unrestricted funds budget during 2020.