Come the end of cricket season, you’ll hear a regular refrain. “Winter well,” say umpires to players, players to coaches, and coaches to scorers. There’s a relief to it, the end of a long slog, but also an uncertainty, a sense of what-on-earth-now; winter, particularly in the UK of course, is a horrid, anti-cricketing time of bitter cold, away from the camaraderie of the summer game.
When the time comes for Ryan Carters to turn to his team-mates and say “winter well”, it’s fair to assume what he is off to do something rather different. Last close season, he sandwiched a stint playing club cricket in Oxford – a rare orthodox pursuit – between a trip “just driving and camping” through central Asian countries such as Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan (“in a word – raw,” he says) with a pair of schoolmates, and visits to Mumbai and Kathmandu, to track the progress of the projects run by the charity he founded, Batting for Change.
True to form, this year he’s stepping out of the ordinary once more. Carters is off to Silicon Valley to undertake a month-long internship with not-for-profit organisation The Khan Academy, who produce free, quality online tutorials for anyone with a web connection. The academy’s slogan is “You Can Learn Anything” which, on a number of levels, is ever so apt.
Education is central to Carters’ very being. Of his trip to San Francisco, he tells Guardian Australia, “I see it as a learning experience myself. They have some great people working for them on how to spread the message of worldwide education and I want to pick up on that, and hopefully bring back some tips for how to run Batting for Change.”
His New South Wales and Sydney Sixers team-mate Doug Bollinger – a famed fun merchant but unlikely to trouble the scorers academically – calls him “the philosophy major”, and indeed he will spend part of this off-season continuing his studies (majoring in… economics) at Sydney University. Batting for Change was founded off the back of another eye-opening winter trip to Mongolia and is all about providing opportunities to learn.
Plenty of sportsmen have charities and, while it’s crude and crass to rank worthiness of cause, Batting for Change, like Carters’ winters, really is a bit different. Not many such organisations are built around a personality or trade on a famous name, and most weren’t founded by a 23-year-old touched by his own experience, desperate to make a difference.
“I’d travelled around the cricket-playing world, witnessing such a shocking level of inequality between Australia and other countries,” he says. “I just thought there’s no reason not to at least try to make a difference in people’s lives, and I felt education was the best way to do that.”
Batting for Change is a beautifully authentic and endearingly homespun organisation. The cause and model are very much Carters’ own and while he does not quite run it from his bedroom, that’s not far from the truth. His manager, Peter Lovitt, helps, and they recently hired a part-time member of staff for the first time, who Lovitt’s office found space for.
Carters is learning the nuts and bolts of how to run a charity on his own and on the job; publicity, paperwork, and promotion were all alien to him when he began. It was Carters who gave a powerpoint presentation to Cricket Australia in Melbourne in September to look into how they could work together, and when he visited the projects with his partner, he shot a series of charmingly amateurish videos on his iPhone to show backers what their money had achieved. His own pawprints are all over the charity.
The model is simple and innovative. Donors pledge their change – five dollars, say – for every six hit by Carters’ Sydney Sixers in the Big Bash League, which goes towards the charity’s projects. In its first season, 2013-14, when Carters was with Sydney Thunder, more than $30,000 was raised and, in partnership with the LBW Trust, three classrooms were built (and are now fully functioning) at Heartland School in Kathmandu. Last year, as the Sixers hit 47 sixes, they made $108,000, which subsidised the tuition of 500 women taking degrees at the SPRJ Kanyashala Trust in Mumbai. This season, as well as supporting another round of 500 women in Mumbai, Batting for Change will subsidise the education of 100 women in Sri Lanka. “We want to build a strong sense of attachment and commitment to our causes,” he says.
This season’s target is $120,000, and with one game of a disappointing Sixers season to go (they are unlikely to make finals, like they did last year), they are some way off. “There’s something inherently uncertain about the model, and I hope that that’s what makes it fun for people to participate in. We’ll gain more from interest in a fun, innovative model that will translate into helping more people, than we might lose by having a disappointing season on the field.”
To run alongside the six-hitting, he has started the Batting for Change XI, whose first outing raised $30,000 (to build classrooms in Sri Lanka) with a day at Barker College on Sydney’s North Shore in November, with Ed Cowan, Nic Maddinson, Alyssa Healy and rugby league stars Brett Kimmorley and Matt Cooper taking part. Carters may not have a name famous enough to trade off, but admits that as a cricketer he is in a privileged position to promote the charity, and having famous friends certainly helps.
The greatest challenge, he believes, is translating people’s compassion into donations. “The fundamental truth,” he says, “is that Batting For Change exists only because of our donors. My trips last year shaped my relationship with the charity as I saw what we are doing.
“To anyone living in the 21st century, a massive challenge is looking around the world and seeing so many problems and then actually taking decisive action. The challenge, if you like, is one about procrastination. It’s very easy to want to solve 1,000 problems and actually solve zero through action.
“The actual step from goodwill to action is to try to explain to people exactly where their money goes and what difference it makes, and that’s what a lot of my time working on the charity, usually at my desk at home in the evening, is spent doing. Hopefully people get that human connection and kick out of it rather than simply seeing it as another financial transaction in their busy lives.”
What is it that Carters learned – and is trying to convey to donors – from these trips last winter, then? “I saw that education transforms characters as well as CVs and that is often more valuable. These women are growing in character across the three years of their degree. They have come from a segment of society that is completely downtrodden and has been for hundreds of years.
“So by telling them that they are important and worthy of an opportunity in life and education at college level, they start to believe in themselves and other people and the goodwill of their friends and their teachers and become empowered. It was pretty great to see these 500 women in Mumbai, clearly very optimistic and enjoying their studies and the opportunities we’ve helped them receive.”
Carters is gearing up for the Batting for Change Cup on Saturday, when the Sixers play the Thunder (both teams are very supportive) at the SCG. He prides himself on not letting his cricket frustrate him, but even he struggles to hide that this has been an exasperating season for the Sixers, who have been beset by injury.
Lucky he has something to take his mind off the game, then. “Thinking about cricket and Batting for Change, one is very demanding on the body and the other requires nothing physically, but does get me thinking. I’m always exercising one or the other! If we’re smart about it we have more time than we think.” Little wonder those winters are quite so busy.
