Giggle me Happy
Following WomanKIND Clydesdale's tradition of working with local school children in creative progressive projects, in 2019 we embraced one of the suggestions presented to us by local pupils and embarked in publishing a joke book written and illustrated by children from the local primary schools. Nearly 700 pupils participated in ‘Giggle Me Happy”, a wonderful joke book full of laughter, cheekiness, most amusing illustrations and some very clever riddles. As inspiration, we provided a series of information and creative sessions where they learned how laughter and humour can be a wonderful tool to help children in hospital and other unfortunate situations feel a wee bit better.
The children, school staff and parent community embraced the initiative with enthusiasm and soon enough we had a wonderful collection of smile inducing jokes and original drawings to populate our book. The children even decided themselves that the book should double as a colouring book, since many of them had heard that colouring-in can be quite therapeutic.
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Originally, the books were to be distributed as free gifts among patients in children wards in hospitals at a Scottish national level. However, we realised that not only is there currently many challenges for hospital governing charities to accept in kind donations destined to the vulnerable groups we were hoping to reach (made even stricter by the COVID-19 pandemic),but it was also brought to our attention that other organisations and community groups working with young people would greatly benefit from these gifts for their service users.
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Thus we opened up our offer to a broader scope of organisations and charities within Scotland. Additionally, as a pilot, we have set a number of copies aside to sell locally and through our online shop. All proceeds from sales of these books will go into a support fund to help the 12 local primary schools with expenses not covered by local-authority funding and which could help avoid individual children from being excluded from opportunities and the quality of their school experience due to economical hardship (school trips, private school supplies, appropriate outdoor clothing or footwear, etc).
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