A new venture for the multi-award winning city centre comedy club, The Glee’s vital fundraising activities will include a voluntary £1 donation on all ticket transactions, and a chance to donate more at the venue via secure collection points. There’ll also be a special autumn comedy event, from which all ticket monies will be donated to the hospital.

Tom Hunt, The Glee’s Marketing Manager, said: “We are pleased to be partnering with such a wonderful charity. The work of Birmingham Children’s Hospital changes lives, and we know that every penny our customers can give will go to helping children – and their families – when they need it the most.”

Elinor Eustace, Deputy Director of Fundraising at Birmingham Children’s Hospital Charity, said: “We are incredibly grateful to The Glee Club for selecting us as their chosen charity and can’t wait to work with the team throughout 2017.

“The money they hope to raise will go a long way to making a huge difference to the lives of our brave children and their families, as we continue our plans to improve our facilities – enabling us to treat even more children from Birmingham, the West Midlands and around the country.”

Opened in 1994, The Glee is firmly established as the West Midlands’ leading comedy club. Attracting in the region of 50,000 visitors a year, the Arcadian-based venue has hosted appearances by many of comedy’s biggest names, including Graham Norton, Peter Kay, Jack Whitehall, Jasper Carrott, and Jimmy Carr, as well as such chart-topping music acts as Adele, and Mumford and Sons.

Birmingham Children’s Hospital is a leading UK specialist paediatric centre, offering expert care to over 90,000 children and young people from across the country every year.

Delivering some of the most advanced treatments, complex surgical procedures and cutting edge research and development, the hospital treats one-in-five children from Birmingham, and one-in-eight from the wider West Midlands.

Every patient and family at Birmingham Children’s Hospital will have been touched by the hospital’s charity in some way. As a result it continually strives to do more for the poorly children in its care, whether that’s a newly refurbished playroom or ward, a state-of-the-art piece of equipment, or even a toy at Christmas.

But the impact of fundraising on patient experience is much more than purely financial – it makes a real difference to the services it provides to children and their families during difficult times.