Charity relaunch is a benefit to Gosport CC

Gosport Borough Cricket Club were one of the first organisations to benefit at a charity relaunch.

Previously known as Hampshire Cricket in the Community, the charity has been renamed The Hampshire Cricket Foundation.

It’s primary aim is to help deliver a healthier future for people across the county by raising funds to support four key objectives.

◼ Provide a life-saving public access defibrillator and training for its use for each of the 160 affiliated cricket clubs in Hampshire;

◼ Screen every 14-year-old club cricketer in Hampshire each year and to support a range of other cardiovascular screening programmes at the Ageas Bowl and at facilities across the county;

◼ Introduce a Healthy Heart Programme across all Hampshire primary schools to help reduce the levels of childhood obesity;

◼ Offer 3,000 heart patients a supervised exercise and rehabilitation programme each year.

The launch was marked with a Hampshire Cricket Foundation Christmas Lunch which helped raise more than £14,000 for the charity.

Gosport Borough - along with Sparsholt, Steep and Hythe & Dibden - received a potentially life-saving defibrillator.

Stuart Robertson, Hampshire Cricket Foundation Director, said: ‘This is a very exciting new phase in the development of the Hampshire Cricket Foundation.

‘It feels that we are at the start of something very special.’

Robertson – pictured left with Hampshire Cricket Board chairman John Wolfe – added: ‘The Foundation will change and save lives in our community and at the same time will help to make every cricket club the heartbeat of its community.’

Heart and circulatory disease kills one in four people in the UK and remains the world’s biggest killer, whilst there are 30,000 out-ofhome cardiac arrests in the UK each year.

One in three children in the UK are overweight or obese by the time they leave primary school and one in four adults in the UK are considered obese.