Jo Robinson-Howarth, a 54-year-old mother of two from Merseyside who won her battle with breast cancer last year by choosing alternative therapies over chemotherapy, is channelling the renewed purpose that experience has given her into building The Happiness Club into a nationwide franchise network of 60 partners within the next 18 months.
Starting from a current base of 11 franchisees, Jo’s plan is to extend The Happiness Club’s reach to 60 locations across the UK before embarking on a phase of international expansion. The growth strategy is driven by a combination of factors: the rising and urgent demand for accessible mental and emotional health support in schools and workplaces throughout the UK, and the proven effectiveness of a model that has been designed from the ground up to produce genuine, lasting change in the lives of those it reaches.
Jo’s professional life has centred for more than a decade on neuroscience, hypnotherapy and mindfulness, and she holds formal qualifications in both hypnotherapy and mindfulness practice. When she received a diagnosis of early-stage HER2+ breast cancer in July 2025, she chose a path that differed significantly from the conventional treatment route, embarking on an intensive alternative therapy programme, transforming her nutrition and going into surgery under local anaesthetic rather than agreeing to a general anaesthetic.
From its current 11-partner foundation, The Happiness Club operates across a wide and growing range of regions, including Sussex, Scotland, Shropshire and the South East of England, amongst others. The franchise network is run predominantly by women who stepped away from corporate careers to find a more meaningful and impactful way of working. It includes practitioners who have woven The Happiness Club’s tools into their existing professional work, women who used redundancy in their fifties as a catalyst to launch their own businesses, and individuals who first used the organisation’s programmes for their own wellbeing and felt so strongly about the results that they chose to become part of delivering them.
Practitioners deliver The Happiness Club’s mindfulness-based resilience programmes to businesses and its CPD-accredited emotional management curriculum to primary and secondary schools.
The urgency of what The Happiness Club is trying to address has rarely felt more apparent. Health and Safety Executive data shows that the UK had already lost three million working days to mental ill-health by 19th February 2026, just 50 days into the new year. The CIPD identifies mental ill-health as the primary driver of long-term workplace absence, responsible for 41% of cases, as well as a significant factor in 29% of short-term absences. The NHS Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey records that 22.6% of adults aged 16 to 64 are now living with a common mental health condition, compared to 17.6% in 2007, a rise that the Mental Health Foundation has called upon society to address as a matter of urgency.
“Stress and anxiety aren’t character flaws, they are learned programmes. And if they can be learned, they can be unlearned. That’s the foundation of everything we do, and the reason our franchise model works: because it’s built on tools that genuinely change people’s lives,” said Jo.
Every franchisee who joins the network is trained to deliver two core programmes. The Schools Programme is a four-week, CPD-accredited curriculum that brings 12 mindfulness techniques to whole primary school communities, building in children the emotional literacy and resilience that will sustain them throughout their lives. “With one in four young people now experiencing a common mental health condition, a 47% increase since 2007, early intervention has never been more critical,” Jo said.
Business Workshops make up the second programme, designed to address the significant and well-documented financial and human cost of poor mental health in the workplace. With UK employers estimated to be losing between £42 and £45 billion every year to presenteeism, sickness and staff turnover as a result of mental ill-health, according to the Mental Health Foundation, the workshops offer organisations a practical, evidence-informed route to building the resilience and wellbeing of their people.
At the philosophical heart of The Happiness Club is a conviction that the wellness industry has for too long been part of the problem rather than the solution. Jo is outspoken about the damage done by what she describes as high vibes culture, a dominant strand of wellness thinking that she argues teaches people to perform positivity and suppress their more difficult emotional experiences, rather than developing the capacity to genuinely process and move beyond them.
“Real happiness is the ability to be fully present to all of life, the difficult and the joyful, the messy and the beautiful,” added Jo. “The willingness to feel everything, rather than chase only the approved emotions. That’s what we teach, and it’s why it works.
“If the daily habits of mental and emotional self-care can be taught early, the downstream impact on stress, anxiety and resilience across a lifetime is profound. This is prevention, not just treatment.”
Anyone interested in exploring a franchise opportunity with The Happiness Club can find out more at thehappinessclub.co.uk/franchise.
