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Every year I publish a “holiday gift guide” column that offers ideas for readers looking to contribute to great charities before year-end, and now there’s an exciting twist: One reader has committed $1 million for a $100,000 award to my top charity for each of the next ten years. I announce this at the end of my column today.

The gift guide column originated many years ago after a Times colleague told me that she and many others struggled at the end of the year to figure out the best charities to donate to. “You should write a column with some suggestions,” she urged. I thought it was an interesting idea but — cough, cough — very un-Timesian, so I sat on it. Over time, however, it became clear that readers yearned for such practical advice, and increasingly I saw a mismatch: readers who wanted to help and didn’t know how, and heroic individuals and organizations who desperately needed resources but were unknown. So I began writing the gift guide to play matchmaker, naming a half-dozen little-known organizations working to make the world a better place.

Then early this fall I had lunch with David Cohen, a former partner at Farallon Capital, and he proposed the annual prize as a way to increase the impact of these giving columns. David, a South African who was a few years behind me at Oxford University, recently established his Ezrah Charitable Trust to focus on the “neediest of the needy.” Shortly after, several others pitched in: Tess and Josh Lewis contributed $25,000 toward the 2019 awards and this was matched by Focusing Philanthropy, an organization that encourages smart donations to high-impact organizations. These donors did not seek to be named, but I thought it important to be transparent and disclose the sources of the foundational funding.