IN A BID TO RAISE £30M TO SPREAD CHRISTMAS CHEER
DAME SHIRLEY BASSEY AND OTHER STARS SHARE THEIR TOUCHING STORIES IN HELLO!
It’s the second week of our Christmas campaign to help raise £30m for good causes and we have five more celebrities sharing vital messages about the charities they support.
HELLO! has partnered with Big Give’s Christmas Challenge, which matches donations made through its platform pound for pound, doubling the amount raised.
A recent poll has found that 25% of people plan to give less to charity this Christmas because of the cost-of-living crisis, while 20% can’t afford to donate at all. But with a pot of £15m in matched funds available from philanthropists, foundations and companies, Big Give hopes to support more than 1,000 charities and fill the gap.
Here, stars including Dame Shirley Bassey and Jenny Agutter talk about the charity that means most to them – and Dame Joanna Lumley writes exclusively for HELLO! about her passion project.
Big Give’s Christmas Challenge closes at midday on 5 December.
To find out more, visit hellomagazine. com/big-give.
DAME SHIRLEY BASSEY
Dame Shirley Bassey is fiercely proud of her Welsh roots and adores the children in her life, so when she heard about an appeal to build a children’s hospital for Wales, she auctioned off 50 of her gowns to support the cause.
Twenty years later, Dame Shirley is a proud patron of Noah’s Ark Children’s Hospital Charity, which opened the doors to its state-ofthe-art facility in Cardiff in 2015 and has named its main thoroughfare Dame Shirley Bassey Way in her honour. The hospital has cared for 73,000 children from across Wales and houses the country’s only specialist oncology department and critical care unit, as well as the only facility where neonatal babies can receive surgery.
“It is my role as a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother that I treasure above all else,” Dame Shirley tells HELLO!.. “This is why the Noah’s Ark Children’s Hospital Charity is a cause so close to my heart, and one that I feel immensely proud to have been able to support over the past 20 years.”
Shirley has seen first-hand how the hospital helps families and makes visits less daunting for sick children such as four-year-old Olivia, who has undergone gruelling treatment for an aggressive form of cancer.
“Our charity funded the radiology suite, but it is often the over-and-above things that mean the most and help children and their families cope in difficult times,” she says.
“Olivia doesn’t see the hospital as a negative place but a place to come and get her nails painted, play with the therapy dogs and meet up with her favourite characters. Isn’t that wonderful?
