In May 2023, I volunteered to champion Women's & Girls' Cricket at Buckhurst Hill Cricket Club - the club has been incredibly supportive at helping us with this aim and have been keen to understand how to increase diversity and parity. We have grown exponentially. We now have 4 women on the Junior Committee, our own Women's and Girls' Committee and 2 women on the Cricket Committee. We have gone from one ""Girl's team"" of varying ages and no women playing to being able to enter hardball leagues this year for women, U15 girls, U13 girls, U11 girls. At all ages the girls are also welcomed into the mixed teams. We managed to get over 20 women to join us by organising fun training sessions whilst their kids were training but in a separate adjacent space. We organise women's and girls' cricket festivals each year, ensuring these are fun but also competitive. We run events to grow the community spirit including organising the Sunrisers and Take Her Lead inspire the girls. It is lovely to see our girls growing up together and doing things together outside of their cricket. We set up the Women's and Girls' Instagram account to celebrate our progress. We ensure that the Jack Petchey awards consider girls as well as boys. The club has now written my role into the Constitution formally.

8 of our women have become Dynamo's Activators, 2 have completed umpiring courses (we host these events at the club without cost to encourage participation), 2 have become foundation coaches, one of whom is now a core coach too. We have employed a female coach to train our girls. We encouraged the women who wanted to to start playing hardball cricket with other clubs last year so that this year they are ready to play with Buckhurst Hill. We try to combine teams with other local clubs when needed so that all girls benefit by getting a chance to play.

One of our aims is to encourage participation whilst also recognising and developing those cricketers who thrive on and need to be challenged.

As a club we are very conscious of creating a safe space for women and girls - we make up over 50% of the population and should have equity and safety in playing sport.
We ensure that the basics are in place :
- everyone coaching the girls have their ECB DBS in place and there is always more than one responsible adult present at sessions.
- all members of the committees and all involved in training, umpiring, scoring have safeguarding training.
- we have a safeguarding officer who is known to everyone.
- we have a culture where any unwanted/ sexist behaviour is reported and we take all complaints seriously.
- we have a separate girls bathrooms with enough space to change in and period products available.
- we provide separate girls training (whilst welcoming girls to train/play with the boys in safe environments where appropriate).

Apart from this though, we have strong female role models including all the wonderful women playing, umpiring and scoring in cricket, sitting on the committees to stand up for our rights and point out the still present unconscious and conscious biases; we highlight women's cricket matches to inspire the girls (and show the boys and men that women play exciting sport) and ran an event with Take Her Lead and the Sunrisers to meet women playing professional cricket. We have paid a female coach to train the girls over the last 2 seasons. We strongly feel that it is important for men and women, boys and girls to see strong females in action in so many roles - normalising this is essential to women's and girls' safety in the world at large and where better to start than in this wonderful sport.