Happy 12th Birthday Spread a Smile
https://spreadasmile.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Untitled-design-2.png 780 400 Susie Susie https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/da2c27e77088cd3c01a99178306ac68f?s=96&d=mm&r=gOn 11 April 2025, Spread a Smile celebrated 12 years since the charity was founded, with a special party for patients and families in The Lagoon at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH).
We were delighted to welcome our friends from Redstor who kindly supported the event, and it was such a lovely day, with music, magic, fairy fun, balloons and delicious cupcakes from the amazing Lola’s Cupcakes. There was so much fun to be had by the patients, families and staff that joined us, and it was lovely to celebrate with everyone at GOSH, where our work began 12 years ago.
In 2013, Co-Founder Josephine’s young nephew, Aaron, was receiving treatment at GOSH. After noticing that Aaron was becoming increasingly withdrawn, Josephine arranged for a magician to visit. It had the most remarkable effect: Aaron’s spirits were lifted and his treatment became more bearable.
As a result, Aaron asked if magicians could also visit friends that he’d met on the ward and Josephine promised Aaron she would find a way to make it happen. Josephine teamed up with friend and former colleague Vanessa Crocker and working closely with GOSH, they founded Spread a Smile.
Since then, the Spread a Smile has continued to work closely with the team at GOSH to spread smiles to patients across the wards, providing regular in person entertainer visits, online sessions, treat drops and much more.
We are extremely proud of our work over the past 12 years spreading smiles to thousands of seriously ill children and their families and extremely grateful to all of our supporters for helping to make it all possible.
Please email us if you or your company would like to find out more about supporting future events like this – we’d love to hear from you!
A huge thank you to Redstor and Neil, Olena, Kateryna and Philipos for supporting the party and here’s to many more years spreading joy and happiness when it’s needed most.
We were joined by nearly 100 people including inpatients, outpatients, family members and hospital staff for fun art activities run by our artist Abi, entertainment from Mr Magic, poetry from Judge the poet and a little bit of fairy magic from Fairy Jude. Our Co-Founder Josephine and her therapy dog Buddy also joined us to help spread even more smiles. There was also a quieter space for one-to-one chats and colouring.