Mike and Shuna Dickson

Catch Mike and Shuna Dickson on Do Radio: Where To Next? with Mike Warwick and Dan Kieran 1st - 7th June 2026.

Mike and Shuna Dickson are the kind of people who change the world not by planning to, but by putting their hand up. Their story begins with a moment of pure serendipity: Mike, running a bicycle shop in Covent Garden, met a twelve-year-old girl with cerebral palsy whose powered wheelchair gave her a freedom that stopped him in his tracks. When he was challenged to run the London Marathon shortly afterwards, he remembered her, and from that single act of connection, everything followed.

They raised £9,000 before they reached the starting line. Donors started asking if there was a charity doing this work for children across the country. There wasn't. One year later, Whizz-Kidz was registered. Since then, it has raised over £150 million and helped more than 70,000 young people.

But the Dicksons noticed something else along the way: that giving changes the giver. The people who ran marathons and climbed mountains for Whizz-Kidz would meet the child whose wheelchair they'd funded, and something would shift in them permanently. That observation became the foundation of their second act. For the past twenty-five years, through their advisory practice and the Rainmaker Foundation, they have worked with businesses, families, and wealthy individuals to help them move from what they call success, the hard-won accumulation of financial achievement, to significance: becoming genuinely useful to the world. It is a distinction, they have found, that highly successful people tend to understand immediately and hunger for more than they expected.

Mike’s books, The More You Give, The More You Get and the newly published How to Be a Better Human Being, distil a quarter-century of this work. They are full of the things the Dicksons have learned from remarkable people: from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who taught them about forgiveness as a choice and the South African concept of ubuntu, to Simon Sinek's idea of "sitting in the mud": the radical act of simply being present with someone in their struggle, without rushing to fix them.