Andy Sellins, from Brighton, began championing the use of sport to support vulnerable children following the Brixton Riots in 1981.
Since then, he has led initiatives in former war zones, communities affected by knife crime and locally in East Sussex—where his charity, The Change Foundation (TCF), provided vital support to Ukrainian refugee families fleeing the Russian invasion.
Working with businessman Glenn Ballard, Mr Sellins organised more than 50 sports camps at Ditchling Cricket Club, giving children the chance to escape their worries, make friends, and enjoy being children. TCF also extended its reach to the Polish-Ukrainian border, and today Mr Sellins is running similar programmes in Jordan for Palestinian refugee children, supported by his daughter Lara, a former pupil at Westdene Primary School and Roedean.
Under Mr Sellin’s leadership as chief executive, The Change Foundation has delivered sport-for-social-change programmes to over 250,000 young people across 47 countries and 35 UK towns and cities. The charity has also helped more than 400 organisations launch their own projects, trained nearly 5,000 coach mentors, and supported sports stars—including Lawrence Dallaglio, Courtney Walsh, Bryan Habana, and Chris Gayle—to establish their own foundations.
See the full list of those recognised in the New Year Honours from Sussex here.
Mr Sellins has also been a trailblazer in disability sport, creating and coaching the first England blind cricket team alongside Chichester-based expert Steve Peyman. Together, they introduced blind cricket to countries including the West Indies, Panama, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Cuba.
Sussex has also played a key role in Mr Sellins’ creation of visually impaired rugby, developed with rugby coach Alex Bassan from Fontwell and Change Foundation ambassador Luke Littlewood from Poynings. The sport is now played in seven countries, with Japan set to host the first visually impaired Rugby World Cup in 2026.
Mr Sellins said he is also very proud of the Olympic legacy sports programme he created with Portslade resident Andy Dalby-Welsh. It is called Hit the Top. In 2012 it became the world’s largest disability sports programme and provided opportunities for over 5,000 children to play sport.
Other projects include Street Elite, an award-winning partnership with house builder,Berkeley Homes. With the support of Arsenal and England legend Ian Wright the programme has an 80 per cent success rate spread over 14 years, helping over 1,000 young people on the edge of gangs and criminal activity to gain their first salaried job.
Reflecting on his work, Mr Sellins said: “Sport is a universal language that brings people together, as we’ve seen working with the NYPD in New York, the Afghan women’s cricket team in Kabul, and Palestinian rugby players in Bethlehem. As Nelson Mandela famously said ‘sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire’.
“As any sports fan will know, sport is a great way to make friends, feel connected and feel valued. Teammates and coaches help you through tough times and celebrate through great times and it’s these values which make it the perfect vehicle through which to help normalise the lives of children facing the toughest challenges imaginable and help them emerge from their traumatic start to life to build happy and hopeful lives.”
While continuing to help raise funds for The Change Foundation, Mr Sellins has set up his own charity consultancy, named 43 to reflect the number of his years he has been working in the sector. He’s now supporting non-governmental organisations around the world to become more effective in their life-changing work, including a farming project in Uganda aimed at training orphans to be farmers, a youth cricket project in Cape Town and suicide awareness charity Olly’s Future, based in Worthing.
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