🏊 Swim Serpentine 2025
Thank you for your interest in swimming with Whisper in Swim Serpentine 🥇 on Saturday 20 September 2025!
We have run out of places for 2025 for now, and even our waiting list is looking a bit full, although you may still be able to find places with another charity 💖. If you're on Facebook there's a useful unofficial Swim Serpentine group where charities sometimes advertise places. If you still can't find a place, we hope to be back next year and and you would be very welcome to apply for one of our places for 2026. There's also an excellent chance of getting your own non-charity place for 2026 provided you go to the Swim Serpentine event website in around October-December this year and join the Swim Serpentine mailing list at that time.
Whisper offers you and your supporters a cause where even small donations can be life-changing ✨. We're a very high-impact charity that funds Whisper's Magical Children's Hospital 🏥, a maternity unit 🤰🏾, a free ambulance 🚑 and a nursing school 🎓 in Jinja, Uganda. We run on an annual donation budget of around £250,000. Every £22 donated allows us to treat a child, an average that includes some lengthy inpatient stays 🤒. We estimate that every £279 donated saves a life that would not otherwise have been saved 🧸. Outside Uganda we're entirely staffed by volunteers 💖, helping donations go further.
Swim Serpentine is an annual swimming event 🏆 that takes place in the Serpentine lake 🦆 in London's Hyde Park. You can find out more about the event on the official site. There are several available distances:
| Distance | Equivalent in lengths of a 25m pool |
|---|---|
| Half mile | 32 |
| One mile | 64 |
| Two miles | 129 |
| Six miles (not offered by Whisper) | 386 |
In return for a place we'd like you to donate or commit to raising at least £150 (Half Mile), £200 (One Mile) or £300 (Two Miles) for us. We have optional corporate matched giving 🎁 available which can significantly help you to reach these targets.
Let's take a quick tour 👀 of some of the things we do. This is Whisper's hospital; the hospital opened on another site in 2016 and moved to this building in 2018:
This is the ambulance in front of the hospital:
This is one of our operating theatres:
This is our delivery room in the maternity unit:
This is a lecture in our nursing school:
We can offer you:
- personal attention - we're a small organisation 🙏
- no registration fee
- advice and practical help with fundraising
- optional corporate matched giving, to help you meet your target or to raise more
I cannot tell you how inspiring this charity is. They do incredible work. I am raising money for Whisper but the support I am getting from them is fantastic. I have never had this before when raising money for charity. a previous runner in the London Marathon
