I usually end up calculating the family food bill for the season and sending a matching donation to a suitable charity but this year I thought I'd do something a little different. I decided to ask people who ,may have benefited from my writing, blogging, and presenting to make a small donation to a charity I particularly approve of - and match the first £1,000 of donations.

It can be quite hard to pick a charity when you want to make a donation - but I have a sort of personal connection to the UK NYF (Nepal Youth Foundation) because my financial advisor was one of the founders of the UK branch and a couple of years ago we spent the best part of an hour talking about what the foundation does and how it does it (when we were supposed to be talking about my savings and investments).  Everything she said about how they worked gave me confidence that they were doing the right things in the right way.

The NYF has made a huge difference to child mortality and malnutrition in just a few years, partly by feeding the starving but more importantly by teaching parents how to get the best nourishment from local resources. They've also been busy in related ways - building education centres, teaching teachers, and working to end child slavery, and now (their latest email to me) increasing the vocational training for freed slaves.

If you want to see more of what the NYF does, here's the URL to the UK home page If you want to make a long term difference to peoples' lives, this is a charity worthy of  your support.