In a world where horrible shit seems to be happening on a more regular basis, it’s nice to take a moment to put the spotlight on people who are doing some real good for society.
Step forward, Bill Griffin. Acting as a virtual genie, he’s bringing happiness to complete strangers- by granting them any wish.
He established Crowdwish.com two years ago, with the site offering users the chance to ask for anything they want- with the most popular wish granted each day.
The 44-year-old entrepreneur quit his day job as marketing director at Comedy Central to set up this business and has granted a wish every single day for the past few years.
So far, the start-up has made donations to several charities including Red Cross and Save the Children, as well as surprising NHS staff with gifts and lobbied CEO’s for equal pay the Mail Online reports.
Essentially, you can anonymously publish in 100 characters or less the things you most want from the future. This could be anything from material goods, services, experiences they want to have or causes they believe in.
Speaking to FEMAIL, Bill said:
There are plenty of places that let you do this online – from Facebook to Pinterest and a thousand other services. We get that; but none of these places produce a real world action as a consequence; and we really didn’t want to create a half-empty bucket-list style site where a few people could wistfully talk about climbing Kilimanjaro and a couple of others might say ‘Yeah, I agree’ before falling asleep in front of Modern Family! The thing that makes Crowdwish unique is that every 24 hours we take the most popular wish of the day and do something meaningful about it, in the real world.
People who have made wishes can ask people to support them over social media and the more people who ‘me too’ them, the more chance their wish will be granted.
Once 24 hours have past, the most popular wish is taken on by Bill’s team who then use the power of the combined demand to create results on behalf of those who voted for it.
Bill added:
We don’t claim to magically fulfil wishes like some Disney fairy-godmother and we stick really clear of those kind of cheesy ‘Then Peter Andre jumped out of the cake and everyone started crying’ style resolutions. We just do something positive each day in line with what people want; we are not claiming any magic powers or miraculous abilities; we just do things that are useful, helpful or funny.
Fair play to him. It’s nice to see someone trying to make a positive difference in this pretty messed up world.
