Having beaten breast cancer last year through a course of alternative therapies chosen in preference to chemotherapy, a Merseyside mother of two is putting her renewed determination to work in driving the growth of The Happiness Club, her wellbeing organisation, towards a target of 60 UK franchisees over the coming 18 months.
Jo Robinson-Howarth, 54, has set out a plan to expand the organisation’s current base of 11 franchise partners to 60 locations across the UK, with international growth to follow. The ambition is rooted in both the deepening national need for mental and emotional health support that is genuinely accessible in schools and workplaces, and the demonstrable effectiveness of a business model that has impact at its core.
Having spent more than a decade working professionally across the fields of neuroscience, hypnotherapy and mindfulness, Jo holds qualifications as a hypnotherapist and mindfulness practitioner. She received her diagnosis of early-stage HER2+ breast cancer in July 2025 and took the decision to decline the chemotherapy that was offered to her, opting instead for a carefully structured programme of alternative therapies. She changed her approach to nutrition significantly and went into surgery under local rather than general anaesthetic, a further reflection of her commitment to her chosen path.
The Happiness Club’s franchisee network already spans a broad swathe of the country, from Sussex to Scotland and from Shropshire across to the South East, with many other areas served in between. The franchisees running these operations are predominantly local women who made the choice to leave corporate careers behind in pursuit of work that felt more purposeful and aligned with their values. The network includes practitioners who saw value in adding The Happiness Club’s methodology to their own existing offerings, women who encountered redundancy in their middle years and chose to respond by building their own businesses, and people who first came to the organisation as members, experienced its benefits first-hand, and subsequently chose to become part of delivering those benefits to others.
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 national context in which this expansion is taking place makes the need for what The Happiness Club offers abundantly clear. The Health and Safety Executive has recorded that the UK had already lost three million working days to mental ill-health by 19th February 2026, only 50 days after the start of the year. According to the CIPD, mental ill-health is now responsible for 41% of long-term workplace absences, making it the leading cause, and accounts for 29% of short-term absences too. The NHS Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey adds that 22.6% of adults aged between 16 and 64 are currently living with a condition such as anxiety or depression, up from 17.6% in 2007, with the Mental Health Foundation describing this increase as a situation that demands an urgent and concerted response.
“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.
Franchisees joining the network are equipped to deliver two core programmes. The Schools Programme offers a four-week, CPD-accredited curriculum covering 12 mindfulness techniques, taught to entire primary schools and designed to give children the emotional foundations they need to develop resilience that endures. “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 form the second strand, responding directly to the mounting evidence of a mental health crisis in the workplace. The Mental Health Foundation estimates that poor mental wellbeing costs UK employers somewhere between £42 and £45 billion annually, through the combined impact of presenteeism, absences and the loss of staff. The workshops deliver mindfulness and resilience training in a practical, evidence-informed format directly to corporate clients who are grappling with the effects of stress and burnout.
Underpinning the entire model is a deliberate and principled challenge to the way the wellness industry has operated for much of its history. Jo is vocal in her criticism of what she terms high vibes culture, describing it as an approach that teaches people to perform positivity and suppress the difficult emotions they experience, rather than processing and moving through them in a healthy way.
“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.”
Information on joining The Happiness Club as a franchisee can be found at thehappinessclub.co.uk/franchise.
