Yorkshire Cricket believes passionately in sport as a driving force for good, bringing us together and uniting us. We want to help make the twenty-first century Yorkshire County Cricket Club a place that is truly for everyone, from all backgrounds.
Yorkshire Cricket’s EDI Strategy
Forword from Yorkshire CCC Group CEO Sanjay Patel
I’m delighted to be writing the foreword to Yorkshire Cricket’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy, which I believe will be game-changing for cricket in this county.
Cricket is at the heart of many of our communities in Yorkshire and has the potential to be a force for good, positively changing lives for everyone involved.
For this to happen, the whole game must come together to make the game better. The actions of everyone at The Yorkshire County Cricket Club, Yorkshire Cricket Board, Yorkshire Cricket Foundation and our wider cricket communities are crucial to what can be achieved.
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone that has been involved in the consultation phase that fed into the building of this strategy. By responding to our surveys, engaging in focus groups and providing feedback through a variety of sources, we have been able to develop a plan that should reflect what our stakeholders have told us is important to them.
Listening to our communities and learning from their experiences is vital for us to truly make a difference, and our collective ambitions reflect the importance of this.
In Yorkshire, we have a unique opportunity to grow our game, building on a thriving recreational game to increase engagement with the game and create teams and workforces that are representative of our communities. Again, it will be no surprise that this forms an ambition within our strategy.
Embedding our principles into the culture of Yorkshire Cricket will be the key to the successful implementation of our strategy, and I’m confident that by following our delivery framework we will ensure that EDI is at the heart of what we do moving forward.
We will also be tracking a wide range of data points that have been identified as areas of focus for us to make progress against our ambitions, and we are committed to reporting back on these areas to ensure we are accountable for their progress.
This strategy is of paramount importance to the future of cricket in Yorkshire and I’m looking forward to seeing it develop in the coming years. I would like to invite everyone in Yorkshire to join us on this journey as we strive to ensure that cricket is a game for everyone.
Our Ambitions
Our first Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Strategy sets out the overall ambitions of The Yorkshire County Cricket Club, the Yorkshire Cricket Foundation and the Yorkshire Cricket Board (Yorkshire Cricket) to:
1. Be a force for good, building community trust and confidence in Yorkshire Cricket and proactively reducing the risk of discrimination across Yorkshire Cricket; and
2. Increase Yorkshire Cricket’s reach, representation and engagement to maximise our opportunities and our impact
In developing our EDI Strategy, we recognise the important role our EDI Ambitions play in the overall success of Yorkshire Cricket – from the professional game to our pathway and from match days to recreational cricket and cricket in the community.
Our Approach
Our EDI Strategy has been designed with the Yorkshire Cricket vision, mission statement and values at its heart.
We have co-created our EDI Strategy; building on the Club’s previous EDI Action Plan published in early 2022, and extensive internal and external collaboration and engagement via our Employee Voice annual and pulse surveys, fan and member sentiment surveys and community consultation. Our EDI Strategy benefits from knowledge, research and representation data held both internally and externally through the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) (including the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC) Report) and, in particular, published Yorkshire census data from 2021.
Our Principles
Our EDI Strategy is underpinned by four co-created principles that will both empower and guide all employees, players, participants, volunteers and suppliers to identify, design and deliver strategic and operational EDI initiatives in their role. These principles act as a filter for how we collectively and individually approach and prioritise our EDI activities:
1. Listen and empower: We will engage with the communities we serve, meeting them where they are, drawing on their lived experiences and listening to their voices to inform our thinking.
2. Representation matters: We will strive to be representative of the communities we serve, valuing diversity across our employees, members, fans, pathways, volunteers and participants.
3. The Spirit of Cricket: We will be driven by an unwavering commitment to uphold and promote the human rights values as defined by the Equality and Human Rights Commission of Safety, Fairness, Respect, Equity and Dignity.
4. Connecting communities: We will bring people together, using the power of cricket to unite the communities we serve, strengthen our society and change lives.
Our Impact
Under each of our ambitions, we have identified key result areas (KRAs) that we will use to measure the impact of the EDI initiatives. Each KRA will be baselined and progress monitored over the lifecycle of this strategy.
Further, we will manage impact through the effective mitigation of EDI risk at the Club through tracking of residual risk ratings.