Fancy £500 to start your ACTionism journey?
Drop Dead Generous is a UK-based social enterprise giving £500 grants to 1,000 people worldwide to carry out creative acts of kindness - a half-million-dollar experiment in whether generosity is truly contagious - and if it can bring people together to create more kindness and more action.
Collective action doesn't always begin with a fully formed idea or a clear path. Sometimes it starts with a roast dinner for strangers, a bouncy castle in a community centre, or an ice cream truck parked outside a mosque.
We're often told that the hard part of starting something is finding others who care about the same things, making the first move, and trusting that small actions can ripple outwards.
Which is why we think Drop Dead Generous - a social kindness experiment has found a fun way to make this first step easier.
Drop Dead Generous is a UK-based social enterprise giving £500 grants to 1,000 people worldwide to carry out creative acts of kindness - a half-million-dollar experiment in whether generosity is truly contagious - and if it can bring people together to create more kindness and more action.
Founded by Tom Cledwyn and John Sweeney in November 2024 and inspired by Chris Anderson's Infectious Generosity, it sidesteps the bureaucracy of traditional grant-making.
The application takes five minutes.
Decisions come back within a week.
The only ask is that grantees capture what happens and share the story - because the founders believe the real impact lies not in the individual acts, but in what those stories collectively provoke in others.
The model runs on collective action principles. Every 25 times a grantee's story is shared, a new $500 grant is triggered. The founders plan to eventually hand decision-making to the community itself. And a weekly newsletter and podcast (The $500,000 Answering Machine) feed each story back into the collective. As of early 2026, DDG has given around $139,500 to 279 people worldwide.
UK Projects in Action
Some of the UK-based grants are a real insight into what ACTionism looks like in practice - local, and rooted in real relationships:
- Amina — a London GP, hiring an ice cream truck for her local mosque during Ramadan as a gesture of welcome
- Lara — booking a community centre with a bouncy castle for an afternoon of neighbourhood connection
- Claire — putting on a full roast dinner for 33 residents of a homeless hostel in Hillingdon
- Jeremy — a retired Portobello Road volunteer, channelling his grant through a 150-year-old family fruit and veg stall to provide fresh produce boxes to their neediest customers
- Samii — building Hug100, a movement to create 10,000 free hugs in a single day
- Helen — distributing kindness envelopes at a food bank, a toddler group, and her local hospital
- Ann — hiding surprise gifts in library books, shop shelves, and gym changing rooms
- Michelle — giving a talented busker a day in a professional recording studio
None of them waited for permission or a grand plan. They saw something and stepped into it.
What would you do with £500?
If someone handed you £500 tomorrow and said, "Do something kind," what would you do? What is the thing you have been noticing in your community that could make a difference to people's lives?
That idea is where ACTionism starts.
How to apply
So if you've got an idea, head to www.dropdeadgenerous.org, share your idea, and you might just get the money that could be the start of something — not just for those you help, but for you. Because if there is one thing this experiment keeps proving, it is that the act of giving changes the giver, too. And from there, you find the others.
