A man is hiding envelopes filled with €10 notes around Dublin to inspire others to do good.
Film-maker Matt Callanan has spent about £1,000 of his own money on the project Tenner For Good, which sees him hiding money in cities to inspire a domino effect of kindness.
Each envelope contains a tenner and a note with two rules. Number one: don’t spend the money on yourself. Number two: do some good with it. So far he’s hidden them around Cardiff and, just this week, Dublin.
“The world definitely needs to be a kinder place,” he tells HuffPost UK. “I think if people focus more on positivity and help spread it, it’ll just make the world a lot happier – and I don’t think it needs to be grand gestures or [take up] a lot of your time either.”
It’s not the planting of money that makes it worthwhile for Matt, his real passion is helping to nurture the stories that come out of it.
“I love that domino effect that you can create,” he says. “I think my favourite one that’s come out of it, there was this guy in Bristol and he didn’t find any of the tenners but he heard about it and wanted to do his own.
“He brought this homeless guy into his house, listened to his story, gave him a cup of tea and on the way out gave him a couple of tenners, wished him well, and then the guy got back in touch with him a few weeks after that and said that he’d now got his benefits sorted, a job sorted and a house sorted.
“And it was all because this guy Ben had given him his time and made him feel valued. That was just a lovely outcome.”
When Matt hides the envelopes, he will always try and place some of them near to charity shops or charities. In one instance he hid an envelope outside a children’s hospital under a bench.
“The guy who found it [who worked in the hospital] saw the envelope, went back in to the workplace, told them the story and they all started chipping in tenners,” says Matt.
“He got to £150 and he thought: what can we do for the kids? They turned it into 150 Easter eggs and he went back dressed as a bunny and delivered all the eggs to the kids in the hospital.”
Tenner For Good is just one part of Matt’s kindness project, We Make Good Happen – he hopes to be able to register it as an official charity next year.
Part of his voluntary work sees him go into schools, workplaces and even community groups like the Brownies to talk about helping others. In the near future he’s hoping to hide money around a city in England and then Scotland.
“It’s just getting people thinking about what joy they could bring or how you could make someone’s moment, or day, or week with a simple amount of money,” he says.
“The kids come up with the best ideas. They’re really creative.”
He recently donated money to a Brownies group who spent it on stationery and made lots of ‘get well soon’ cards. They went into a local hospital and gave them out to patients, and they also made gratitude cards which they handed out to the doctors and nurses in the hospital, thanking them for doing a great job.
“They gave them all these ‘thank you’ cards just saying how much they valued their job and their time and the fact they were saving people and making people feel better,” says Matt.
“And apparently all of these doctors and nurses ended up bursting into tears because it was just such a kind thing for these young girls to do for them.”
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