What a contribution is, what it is not, and what happens to your money. Written to be read, not to be survived.
The M1llion is operated by Dijkstra B.V., trading as them1llion, registered in the Netherlands under Chamber of Commerce number 92194702, VAT number NL865926712B01, at Stationstraat 57, 6361 BH Nuth. You can reach us at hello@them1llion.com.
Your contract is with that entity and no one else. The same entity receives the money, holds the bank account, and is the company that the twenty-five percent described in section 10 is carved out of.
them1llion is a trade name, not a separate company. Where these terms and the contest rules talk about a stake in the company, they mean shares in Dijkstra B.V. There is no entity called them1llion to own a piece of.
Why this matters to you
Money is not collected on behalf of a third party. It goes to the entity named above, which spends it on its own growth. That is a different arrangement from crowdfunding, where a platform holds money for someone else.
Your bank statement will read THEM1LLION, so you will recognise it weeks later. If it ever shows something else, tell us before you dispute it.
The M1llion is a social experiment with a funding goal attached. It tests one question with a countable answer: whether one million people can be moved to act by social connection alone, without advertising spend. Every contribution is both a data point in that experiment and working capital for the company running it.
We publish the result either way. If we reach a million people, we publish how. If we stall at forty thousand, we publish that, along with where people dropped off and why we think they did.
A contribution is a payment for participation in the experiment and for the items listed in section 5. It is not any of the following, and nothing anywhere on our website, in our emails or in anything we say should be read as suggesting otherwise:
Contributing a larger amount changes none of the above. There is no tier that unlocks anything and no amount that buys a better position.
The minimum contribution to the pot is 1.00 in euros or US dollars. The maximum is 250.00. You may choose any amount in between.
Payment costs are charged on top of your chosen amount rather than deducted from it, so that the full amount you choose reaches the pot. The exact split is shown before you confirm and again on your receipt. We pass these costs through at what our payment provider charges us, and we reconcile the difference publicly every month. If we have over-collected, we say so and correct the rate.
Payments are processed by Stripe. We never see or store your card details.
The ledger shows contributor numbers, first names and countries. It does not show email addresses, amounts contributed, or anything else. You can ask us to list you anonymously, or to remove your entry entirely, at any time and without giving a reason. Removal from the ledger does not remove your contribution from the total.
As a consumer in the EU you have a right of withdrawal of fourteen days. You can use it by emailing hello@them1llion.com and we will refund you in full, including the payment costs, without asking why.
Outside that period we will still refund you on request up until the point the target is reached or the experiment closes, because we would rather have your goodwill than your euro.
Open point for your lawyer
If any part of what you receive counts as digital content delivered immediately, EU law requires an explicit waiver of the withdrawal right at checkout, or the fourteen days keep running. Decide which way you want this and make the checkout match.
Contributions are ring-fenced for one project: TENE, a waste collection and processing programme for Curaçao. The island has a litter problem that is visible from any road, and TENE is the attempt to fix it in a way that pays the people doing the collecting rather than relying on goodwill. Your euro is working capital for that, and for nothing else.
Ring-fenced means what it says: the money sits in a separate account, is spent only on TENE, and the spending is published monthly, broken down by category, alongside the reconciliation of payment costs described in section 4. We do not take a management fee out of the pot.
Two things you should know before you decide
TENE does not exist yet. It depends on an agreement with the government of Curaçao that has not been signed. We are open about that because it is the main risk you are taking.
What is not at risk is where the work happens. The money is committed to cleaning up Curaçao either way. If the route through central government does not come, we take a different route to the same island and the same problem: working with individual municipalities, with local businesses, or with organisations already doing this on the ground. We announce the route we are taking and why, and we do not quietly repurpose your euro into something else.
Dijkstra B.V. does other things too. It is a project and development company, and its other current activity is a property development on Curaçao called Brisa di Kòrsou. Your contribution does not fund that and cannot be spent on it. But see section 10, because it does affect what the twenty-five stakes represent.
The experiment runs for twelve months from day one, which is the day the first contribution is accepted: 1 September 2026. The target date is therefore 1 September 2027. If the target is not reached in that time, it is extended once by six months. Nothing else changes during the extension.
If the target is still not reached after eighteen months, we do not refund and we do not stop. We proceed with whatever has been raised, and the stake on offer shrinks in proportion to it.
How the number of places scales
Twenty-five places over one million is one place for every 40,000 raised. It is a plain division of the goal into twenty-five equal steps, and nothing more than that: 40,000 is not a price for a percent, and no percent is ever sold. Every stake, whether it is the first or the twenty-fifth, is given rather than bought.
So the pot at the end is divided by 40,000 and rounded down, and that is how many places there are. 750,000 gives 18 places. 400,000 gives 10. Below 40,000 there is not even one step, and in that case only, we cannot proceed at all and everyone is refunded in full.
Steps not reached are simply never issued. They stay with the existing shareholders and are not awarded later.
We announce which of these applies before the eighteen months are up, not after, and we publish the result either way.
Read this part twice
Outside the fourteen day withdrawal period and the refund window in section 7, a contribution is not refundable because the target was missed. If you would only give a euro on condition that a million others do the same, this is the moment to decide against it. We would rather lose your euro here than have you feel misled in eighteen months.
Contributions are open from day one. The contest for the twenty-five places opens later, because two things have to be finished properly first: an independent jury has to be assembled and named, and the foundation that will hold the certificates has to be established by a civil-law notary. Neither is something to rush.
The contest opens by 1 December 2026, three months after day one, and the exact date is published on the contest rules page and emailed to every contributor at least two weeks in advance.
What happens if we do not manage it
If the contest has not opened by 1 March 2027, six months after day one, every contributor is refunded in full, including payment costs, without anyone having to ask. We stop, we say why, and we publish what went wrong.
This is a promise with a date on it precisely because you are being asked to contribute before the contest exists. Waiting is fine. Waiting indefinitely is not.
Contributing never gave you entry to the contest and never will, so nothing about your contribution changes when the contest opens. Section 10 explains why the two are separate.
Up to twenty-five percent of Dijkstra B.V. is set aside in equal parts of one percent. Twenty-five parts if the target is reached, fewer in proportion to the pot if it is not, as set out in section 9. These are offered to twenty-five people selected through a contest that is free to enter and open to anyone eligible, whether or not they have ever contributed.
The contest is governed by its own rules, published separately. In summary: entry costs nothing, contributing gives you no entry and no advantage, and selection is made by an independent jury on the merit of each entry rather than by chance.
The contest is open to residents of the European Economic Area only. Not because we want it that way, but because offering shares to the public is regulated country by country, and one regime is what we can do properly today. We intend to widen it as we are able to, and we will say so here when we do.
The stake is in the parent, not in the project
Your euro funds TENE. The twenty-five stakes are one percent each of Dijkstra B.V., the company that runs it, which also holds the property development mentioned in section 8. So a selected entrant becomes a part-owner of the whole company, not of TENE alone.
We could have hidden that in a structure. We would rather write it down: what you fund and what the twenty-five receive are related but not identical, and anyone deciding either to contribute or to enter should know that from the start.
Being selected means being offered the opportunity to acquire a one percent stake. It is an offer you are free to decline, it is subject to the securities law of your country, and it may not be available everywhere. The full structure is published before entries open.
You must be eighteen or older and contributing on your own behalf with your own money. Anyone anywhere can contribute, with one exception: we cannot accept money from countries under EU or international sanctions. That list changes, so we do not reproduce it here. Our payment provider applies it automatically, which means a payment from a sanctioned country will simply not go through.
We may refuse or refund any contribution without giving a reason, including where we suspect fraud or where accepting it would put us in breach of sanctions or payment rules.
Contributing is worldwide. The contest is not, yet.
The two are governed by different law. Taking a contribution is a straightforward payment. Offering someone shares is regulated separately in every country, which is why the contest is currently open to residents of the European Economic Area only. See section 10 and the contest rules.
We collect your name, email address and country, and we keep a record of your payment. We use these to assign your number, send your receipt and updates, and meet our accounting obligations. We do not sell your data or share it for advertising.
You can ask for a copy of what we hold, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Full detail is in our privacy statement.
We may change these terms, but never retroactively in a way that reduces what you were promised when you contributed. Every version stays published with its date, so you can always read the one that applied to you. Material changes are emailed to contributors before they take effect.
If something is wrong, email hello@them1llion.com. We respond within five working days and we would much rather fix it than argue about it.
Dutch law applies. Disputes go to the competent court in Maastricht, which does not affect any right you have as a consumer to bring a case where you live.