About the GPLF

The Gandon Prodger Legacy Fund was established to honour the late Simon Prodger and Nick Gandon. The fund will operate until the end of 2025. It is launched to raise significant funds for four specific charities and to implement new pilot activity.

In April 2023 Simon Prodger died unexpectedly. He was a remarkable man who did so much good for cricket. When he died, his friends established the Simon Prodger Legacy Fund inside the Club Cricket Charity, a charitable fund through which to create a legacy for him and to raise funds and support causes close to his heart.

Nick Gandon, a great mate of Prodge, was centrally involved in all of this. But, at the end of 2023, just when Fund activities were ready for take off, Nick himself became unwell. As a result, the campaign was placed on hold.

Nick was diagnosed with non-curable pancreatic cancer in January 2024 and, in his own words, he is now approaching “the final furlong”. With full support from the Prodger and Gandon families, the trustees of the Club Cricket Charity resolved to merge the Simon Prodger Legacy Fund with a similar fund in Nick’s name – called “the Gandon Prodger Legacy Fund” (GPLF). This merger could not be more appropriate: the two were great friends and kindred spirits; they adored cricket, working together on many ‘cricket for good’ initiatives at home and abroad; they cared about the same causes, ones which the Fund aims now to resource generously following the hiatus in 2024.

The linking of the Gandon and Prodger names allows GPLF to be launched with renewed impetus, with renewed ambition and a will to catch up on some lost time.

GPLF Distribution of Funds

The GPLF programme is supporting with four specific charities. We have our eyes set on generating at least half a million pounds over the next 12 months in order to distribute these funds to our good causes. While perhaps these are not eye-watering sums of money by standards of the major sports charities, they are nonetheless very significant relative to their own more humble standards.

Two of these operate abroad and two at home in the UK: the East Africa Character Development Trust in Nairobi, Kenya, the Alsama Project in the Lebanon, The Club Cricket Charity and the Saracens Foundation in the UK.

What do these charities share in common? Each:

• delivers work designed to achieve transformational change among young people contending with multiple disadvantages; 
• uses cricket and / or sport more widely as a medium for engaging young people;
• are very well-known to both Simon and Nick;
• are organisations in which the Club Cricket Charity trustees have full confidence:  in their governance, ability to deploy funding wisely and to deliver strong outcomes.

Three Areas of Activity 

There are currently three main strands of activity for generating funds and / or through which new pilot activities are being implemented. We anticipate, however, that additional initiatives will materialise as and when new people engage with our campaign and bring forward ideas of their own.

The three immediate strands are as follows:

1. Pass the Bat On

Cricket has a problem with cricket bats. Almost all bats sold in the UK are now manufactured in South Asia with English willow dispatched to Asia before being made into bats and returned to the UK for retail.

Bats come with a horrifying carbon footprint; they also come at enormous cost – it is not unusual these days for high-quality bats to be sold for up to £800, meaning that far too many potential cricketers feel “priced out” of our game as active participants.

Pass the Bat On is a cricket bat refurbishment scheme operating at different levels. In addition to generating income for GPLF, it aims to achieve much wider impact by addressing Affordability, Inclusivity, Environmental and Heritage issues. It involves our sourcing 500 used bats – in reasonable condition, capable of being restored to “almost good as new”.

We will get these bats repaired and refurbished by a very reputable cricket equipment business; we will then re-brand them and then re-sell them at affordable prices. We also intend to donate entirely free of cost at least 10% of our refurbished bats to particularly disadvantaged or deserving young cricketers.

We are now actively sourcing cricket bats which ranging from, at one extreme, those redundant in attics but which, with skilful refurbishment and repair, can be brought back to active life, on the other hand, bats recently used by professional cricketers and now surplus to their needs but which still have plenty of “miles in the tank”.

The refurbished bats will be sold at different prices, ensuring outstanding value for money. While the “best” bats (i.e. those recently used by top professional cricketers) might sell for £150+, the majority will be sold at eminently affordable prices of about £50 or £75. All income generated through sales will be added to the Fund for distributing to the four good causes.

In piloting Pass the Bat On, we intend to address a number of major issues beyond merely raising funds for GPLF: cricket participation and affordability; waste and environmental damage. In deploying the skills of traditional UK bat-makers to repair and refurbish used bats, we are determined to help keep alive a trade recognised as an “endangered craft”.

2. Donations and Individual monthly giving

GPLF is seeking funding support predominantly from individuals and trusts and foundations. In addition to welcoming general one-off donations of whatever size, we are launching a programme of individual monthly giving as laid out in Table 2 below. This offers five levels of monthly giving over a 12-month period ranging from £10 per month to £100 per month. Everyone making donations – of whatever size and with whatever regularity is encouraged to do so via the JustGiving platform accessible via the Donate page

Any individuals wishing to donate a minimum of £2,000 immediately becomes eligible to join “The First X1”. There is no upper limit to the sum they might choose to donate and no upper limit to the number of members who can be accommodated in the squad. We’d love a First X1 team comparable in size to the England cricket set-up – what with its many reserve players, coaches, back-room analysts and psychologists!

Restricted donations:  In the event that donors wish to restrict how their funding support is applied in terms of the four charitable causes, they may do so – much as hope that most will be happy to support all four of our beneficiaries.

To say that Dad “lived and breathed” cricket is an understatement. Everyone who knows him will recognise his boundless passion and commitment to cricket and his wanting to make it a game a game for everyone. Playing to their different strengths, he and Prodge inspired so many people, challenged us to think differently and achieved so much together. We hope that their legacies keep on growing through this fund and its work.

Jo and Amy Gandon

Dad adored cricket.  He was happiest coaching colts, encouraging young people from less privileged communities into cricket and promoting his passion for the game and its character building properties.   It was at grass roots level, in communities both at home and abroad, where he felt it would do the most good – be that in Kenya or through welcoming Afghan refugees placed in Watford to come along to the club. pick up a bat and have a go..

 Lisa and Sarah Prodger

SleepOut Event

A broader interpretation of homelessness:  SleepOut events are common among homeless charities, deployed to raise funds in support of homeless men and women.  In planning our SleepOut event we have considered homelessness in a broad but nonetheless highly relevant sense:   we are mindful of refugees supported by the Alsama Project in the Lebanon.

• those with no home who have escaped the horror of war and displacement in Syria, their homeland;
• young Kenyans with no home other than a single-room corrugated iron dwelling in Nairobi’s slum communities, being supported by the East Africa Character Development Trust;
• prisoners supported by Saracens Foundation who, on release from prisons in Hertfordshire, have no home to which they can return;
• other recently-arrived refugees in the UK supported by Saracens Foundation and the Club Cricket Charity,
• those who have fled their homelands in Afghanistan and elsewhere and for whom cricket can play such an important part in integration and support.

SleepOut Event at Lord’s:  our event is a single, large event hosted (courtesy of MCC) at Lord’s Cricket Ground on Thursday 27^th February 2025. We plan to enlist 500 individual participants willing to spend a night in a sleeping bag underneath one of the stands at Lord’s.  In the face of such a challenge, participants will get themselves individually sponsored (using JustGiving pages, etc) by friends, families and colleagues to raise funds for GPLF – and, in cases where we partner with other charities, for some other cricket-related good causes too. 

£1,000 per participant:  Experience suggests that reasonably well-networked and motivated participants might on average expect to generate £1,000 in sponsorship –  some will do much less, while others will do much more.  We are working on an assumption that 500 participants will generate £500,000 but that this will be further supplemented by Gift Aid.

Gift Aid:  All funds supplemented by Gift Aid will be retained by the Club Cricket Charity to help cover SleepOut event costs, alongside other general campaign costs. Any Gift Aid money above a £50,000 limit will be distributed to the four good causes in line with our distribution plans.

Nairobi Event:  A comparable Challenge event will take place in Nairobi, Kenya (organized by EACDT) on 27^th February 2025 to complement the UK event at Lord’s.  

Advisory Group

Advisory Group: The Club Cricket Charity is a small charity with a small group of trustees and one salaried staff member. Our experience since we were founded in 2013 has largely been limited to an extensive project during which we have distributed defibrillators to over 800 amateur cricket clubs. 90 of these defibrillators have been since deployed in emergencies and helped to save at least 90 lives.

The Gandon Prodger Legacy Fund takes the charity into new territory in terms of scale and scope of our work. and will make new demands on the trustees. It is in order to ensure that trustees are well-supported in implementing and overseeing the Fund and in order to manage conflicts of interests that we are assembling an Advisory Group.

The Group will monitor the campaign’s income and expenditure and make specific recommendations to CCC trustees about distribution of funds to the four good causes.

Distribution of funds

A clear formula exists for establishing exactly how distributable funds are to be allocated to four charities. On the recommendation of the Advisory Group, CCC trustees will make payment of donations every six months, beginning in May 2025. The beneficiary charities will be asked each six months to report back on outcomes achieved as a consequence of the support provided.

Summary

We have resisted to date establishing a specific fundraising target. Much will depend on the general momentum we create and maintain, on the willingness of the network to spread the word and the attention we might secure from the media. That said, it would be disappointing if we could not generate half a million pounds to distribute to the four good causes and create a real legacy for the two people whose contribution to cricket and society we are seeking to honour.

THE GANDON AND PRODGER FAMILIES, TOGETHER WITH THE TRUSTEES OF THE CLUB CRICKET CHARITY, ARE VERY GRATEFUL FOR YOUR ATTENTION.