11/04/2024
At the start of April I headed up to Lord’s to meet Angus Berry, Operations Director of the MCC Foundation. Accompanied by the view of Sam Northeast on his way to scoring his triple century, we talked all about the work the Foundation does, the challenges it faces, and aims for the future. On the same day, the government announced a £35 million investment in grassroots cricket facilities and state schools over the next five years, so there was a certain sense of positivity for the next few years, despite the aforementioned challenges for charities like the MCC Foundation.
NB this is about 2500 words so I’ve very kindly put in some jump links below if you want to skip to a certain bit. Lucky you!
What is the MCC Foundation?
The MCC Foundation is the charitable arm of the MCC, delivering cricket projects in the UK and in various countries overseas. They’re currently quite small, though growing. In the “cricket charity” landscape they’re smaller than Chance to Shine and the Lord’s Taverners, but a bit bigger than ACE.
MCC Foundation at Home
Nationally, the programme in the UK is successful and growing. Some quick stats from 2023:
✿ They have delivered 126 Hubs across England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland – up from 77 last year.
✿ Against a target of 4,300 participants they have provided coaching to 4,700 young people aged 11-16.
✿ This amounts to nearly 19,000 hours of coaching.
✿ They have welcomed 52% more girls onto the programme than in 2023 – providing an extra 500 girls with free to access coaching.
✿ 80% of participants said that being part of the Hub made them happier.
The stats are great, but it’s not the whole story. The work in the UK is doing good beyond numbers. As Berry says: “What I love being able to do on a daily basis is speak with the coaches, speak with parents, speak with kids that come through the programme and hear about their positive experiences, because that’s what’s important. When you see the amount of provision and quality of provision that people get in Independent schools, and what there is in state schools, which is very, very little. So it’s great to see kids get these opportunities through our work.”
They don’t just provide cricket, but support participants with mental health and wellbeing, nutrition, strength and conditioning, and basically just their development outside of sport, which is called Cricket Plus.
Being up at Lord’s, Middlesex is the Foundation’s “home” team, though they work with counties across the country to provide hubs. With Middlesex’s men’s team not being particularly diverse, especially compared to the diversity of the local area, there is certainly an aim from the Foundation to actively improve the balance of teams by getting state school kids into the setup:
“I think a big aim of ours with the ECB is around getting players into the talent pathway and getting them onto county programmes. Every one of those kids that we’re able to get onto the pathways is improving that diversity. Year on year we’re at about 15 to 20 of the kids in our programme end up on the talent pathway. We’ve got Josh Boyden and Seren Smale, who both played for England Under-19s in the last year. They’ve come through the programme and looking at real outcomes, long term, you would hope we’ll keep shifting the dial on the percentage of state school cricketers playing professional cricket.”
Pathways into cricket are really important for the MCC Foundation and other cricket charities – Chance to Shine mostly work with primary school children, and one of the key goals when I spoke to them was to ensure that children continue engaging with cricket after they’ve left Chance to Shine programmes, should they want to. The MCC Foundation mostly works with children aged 11-16, so there’s a great opportunity to carry people through from there.
“We try to make sure they’re there so that if people want to and are good enough, there is a way for them to get in. I’ve spent a lot of my time working with those other charities as well, because at the end of the day a kid doesn’t really care what shirt they’re wearing or which charity project they’re on, they care that they’re playing cricket, and are able to access those programmes. We work with Chance to Shine, particularly on their Street Cricket project, because talented kids in those programmes often end up on ours and then potentially into the talent pathway.
“We make sure that all the kids on our programmes know there are lots of different options open to them, not just this one, and that there are all these free to access programmes. We are a hard ball cricket project because we’re aiming to get people out there playing hard ball cricket.
“We have provision to give people care and help with travel bursaries if they can’t get to the hubs. It’s all about how we can remove as many barriers as possible because cricket has so, so many.
“One thing we’ve done on the girls’ side of things is make sure that if someone has signed up to our Hubs program, they get a place on it. So, that will be either through funding extra coaches or pointing them to another Hub close by if that’s an option as well.”
MCC Foundation Abroad
The Foundation is involved in a number of programmes overseas and I’d definitely recommend scanning the 2023 review for an overview of those because I can’t fit them all in here. They are currently partnering with programmes in Lebanon, South Africa, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Sri Lanka and Nepal, and last year worked in Serbia too (for more about Serbian women’s cricket read our interview with their captain Sladjana here). Angus and I focused a bit on their work in Nepal.
“Social impact is at the core of what we’re trying to achieve and they will all look slightly different depending on the country, but the programme in Nepal is probably the one closest to my heart. I set it up eight years ago with a friend from university and initially it was very focused on education around gender-based violence and child marriage, which were two key topics we’d identified for change. This was in a part of Nepal where girls weren’t playing sports at all.
“That project is growing and growing too and the people working on it are amazing. There’s a woman called Sara Begg working on a project called Cricket Changemakers which we are part of, and it’s helping change attitudes around girls and sports. They do research in the community with peer groups and look at the barriers that girls face playing sports and then design interventions off the back of that.
“Menstruation was one thing perceived as a big barrier, so there was an event called the Cricket for Dignified Menstruation Cup which was a showcase of women’s cricket, but it was also an education piece to show ‘this is normal, not only can girls compete in sport while menstruating but they can still be in school [girls in Nepal frequently do not attend school while menstruating either due to stigma or lack of facilities, meaning they lose a significant amount of education compared to boys – that’s if they keep attending at all].”
And it’s not just social impact, cricket is still key.
“What we found there is you design a project which is based around supporting women and girls, you link it to cricket, and you uncover unbelievable talent too.
“One of the girls that I met five, six years ago. Her dad wouldn’t let her play sport. She kind of snuck onto one of our programs, absolutely fell in love with cricket. 18 months later, she was playing for the Under-19s in the World Cup qualifier. Now she’s earning a living as a community coach. Seeing that kind of impact is amazing.”
Similarly, in South Africa a lot of the work on the ground ties social impact and education in with cricket.
“We work with Catch Trust, who are Gary Kirsten’s Foundation. We’re working on a female empowerment programme in Cape Town, so they come and play cricket at their centre and then each month there’s a different topic where they get experts in to talk.
“They’ve currently got three months working on different aspects of mental health. The topics come from the girls themselves, and it provides an all-female space outside of what could be a difficult home setting in which to discuss important topics.
“And it’s tied to something that they love doing, i.e. cricket, so it becomes a really positive experience, moreso, I think, than if it was in school. For me that’s the amazing power of sport.”
Challenges
Probably the most obvious challenge for the Foundation is an image problem – people tend to assume that the connection to the MCC means they’re a really wealthy charity, which isn’t the case. There can also be a public perception when you’re the charitable arm of another organisation that the charity is not actually doing much – and sometimes that’s true – but looking at their income and expenditure, like the nerd I am, you can see not only are they not a wealthy charity, but they spend a healthy proportion of their income on delivering on-the-ground work. In short, they’re absolutely doing stuff with the money they raise, and they are reliant on donations.
“We depend on donations and we do have a lot of individuals supporting us. As well as one-off donations, we have two schemes. We have a friend scheme, which is a regular donation from £25 a year, and then we have a benefactor scheme, which is a commitment of £1,000, £5,000 or £10,000 per year. We’ve got a few Trusts and Foundations, and then very few corporates.
“We want to be in a position to go for Sport England funding. The ECB funding is a two-year commitment in the first instance, so we hope we can show enough impact that means it will continue after that – same with the MCC. No-one wants to fund programmes that aren’t delivering, so that’s the focus.”
To my mind another key challenge is engagement from county players – male players. This is probably a bit of a pet peeve of mine and we’ll go on a slight Daisy Detour (I am not putting words in anyone’s mouth!), but having worked in charity fundraising and comms for quite a while, it frustrates me not to see more well-known faces behind the work that the charitable arms of cricket clubs are doing. I asked Angus about this.
“Middlesex, like all of the counties in the country, have a relationship with us in terms of promoting the Hub program. They’ll have some of their County age group staff and coaches on our program, but not much beyond that.
“We’ve got really good relationships with the women’s regional setup. A number of players on that setup will be involved in our program. We have an annual event at Lord’s called Springboard, where our most talented players come together for a week at Lord’s and the Sunrisers’ coaching staff and players have done joint sessions with the girls.
“I think we’ve probably found it easier with the women in terms of engagement, our ambassadors are Heather Knight, Sophia. Dunkley, Roberta Avery from Brazil. We don’t have many male players.”
I can’t help but feel that this is an important ‘something missing’, and a problem that spans the counties. Like it or not, the men’s players are still the biggest faces of the counties. Boys playing are going to want to see male role models just as the girls do, but also just having some of your most prominent players showing up and getting involved, whether that’s on social media or at a charity event or a coaching session, not only is it going to draw more attention, but it’s also going to show, hopefully, that people playing at the top of the game actually give a shit about the work that’s being done. That’s going to be so valuable to anyone involved in these programmes. (Something that comes to mind here is the Rajasthan Royals work on menstruation, getting players like Jos Buttler to talk about periods in social media videos).
There will be players who would enjoy being involved; I’m often a cynic but I know it isn’t a case of none of them caring, and it won’t always be up to the individual anyway. Unfortunately, however, it will seem like they don’t care, especially when you contrast it with the fact that the women are showing up.
The picture it ends up painting is that the elite male players are in a bit of a bubble that is too busy and important to get involved with these kinds of activities. There’s probably some truth in the former, though I think most players could spare half a day or a couple of hours here and there. It comes down to priorities, and I guess it needs someone with enough sway to lead from the front and say this stuff is really important. I won’t pretend to know with whom the buck stops, though, I’m just a mouthy girl with a half-baked opinion.
ANYWAY.
What’s next?
What comes through from talking to Angus and looking at the Foundation’s work is this desire to keep people involved and benefiting from cricket once they’ve got that start, whether they came in through a charity programme, the Hundred, the Blast, the Championship or whatever else caught their interest – it doesn’t matter so much how they got into it, just that they did.
“I think the important bit is is when you get those new people in that they are given a chance to stay involved, whether that’s as a spectator, as a fan or whether that’s making sure that they know that there’s a Chance to Shine Programme in their hometown, there’s a Hub there, whatever keeps them on a journey with cricket.
“A great thing about our overseas work is that, particularly in some of the countries like Serbia, there isn’t a preconception of ‘what cricket is’. The barrier to entry is so much lower and there isn’t this assumed divide in who can play, so there’s a kind of joy in the game that you don’t see as much in the UK, and it’s so noticeable.
“In Uganda, we had one coach coaching about 120 kids on a playground, but because they all wanted to be there, they listened to everything he said. We spoke to one of the girls afterwards and we said “what do you want to do when you’re older?” and she said “I want to be a coach”. That feels great because without the barriers that we see more of in the UK, you can see that girls go straight into enjoyment, and then see it as a career option.”
What’s next? Hopefully all these programmes will grow and grow and we’ll keep seeing more players who have come from pathways like the National Hubs making it into county teams and onto England.
Congratulations if you made it to the end of this too-long read. Maybe sling the MCC Foundation a tenner or check out what they’re doing locally to you.
Daisy Cutter 
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