Aspire is deeply saddened by the news that Bill Freedman, our founding chairman (pictured on the left of the photograph above) died peacefully on Wednesday 5th October at the age of 93.  

Peter Stanford, Chairman of Aspire following Bill, said, "He was together, active, dapper and as benign and infectiously positive as ever, right until the end. Every time I saw him he would always ask about Aspire, which retained a special place in his heart.  A successful Anglo-Canadian theatre producer, later running a chain of cinemas around Britain, he was one of the rocks upon which the charity was built: in his generosity in using his West End theatres to put on Sunday evening fundraisers to get the charity going, persuading well-known names of stage and screen to give up their time to draw crowds; in his steadfastness and unflappability when the going got tough with planners and the NHS around building our first Mike Heaffey Centre on the RNOH site that finally opened in 1990; and his commitment to what, in the 1980s when Aspire began, was a still distant goal of inclusion in everything that the charity did.  Aspire’s triumph in making that a reality, and its continuing success, owes much to him."

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