When Vashti Seth first learned that her father had left her £2,000 with instructions to “do something good with it”, she was too lost in grief to give it much thought.

Johnny Richards had been diagnosed with lung cancer just 11 weeks earlier – and initially given between a year and 18 months to live. He lived in New South Wales and Vashti was based in Bristol so she’d left her job in film production, rented her house out and bought a one-way ticket to Australia to spend as much time with him as possible. “I thought we’d have at least a year together,” she says. “We had just five weeks until he died.”

Those weeks were spent at her father’s home with his partner and her six siblings. “The main message he wanted to put across to us all was not living too much in the future and not in the past – you just have to enjoy what you’ve got right now. When he died, I was devastated, overwhelmed. I’d packed my entire life up and was in a state of limbo.”

The sum left to her in his will, with a note her father had written shortly after his diagnosis – only added to her confusion. “Dad had left my siblings personal gifts,” says Vashti. “One got a ring that Dad always wore, another a little emerald Buddha. When I read Dad’s message – to do ‘something good’ – I didn’t know what to make of it, or what to do with it. I just put it to the back of my mind.”

In fact, her father planted a seed – and sent his daughter on a journey that started in India, led to Nepal and on to Africa. Vashti never returned to her former life or career – and instead invested the money to build the UK’s first peer-to-peer crowdfunding charity. Eight years on, deki.org.uk has lent over £800,000 to people in the developing world.

Her father would have relished the adventure. Born into a working-class family, Johnny Richards was a free spirit, who managed to travel the world, have seven children with three partners – and remain extraordinarily close to all of them.

Vashti’s upbringing was far from conventional. She spent her early years in west Wales with her father, mother, older brother, Kite, and half-sister Britt. Before Vashti was born, her parents had gone to India to study Buddhism then returned to Wales and built a wooden hexagonal house in which to raise a family.

Vashti as a baby with her parents, Johnny and Xxxx, and her siblings.

When Vashti was four, her parents separated and her father went to Australia, taking Kite. He settled half way between Brisbane and Sydney. He built two more houses (both hexagonal), founded a music festival, had another child with his partner, Bryony, and became stepfather to two more. At the time of his diagnosis in 2006, aged 57, he was building a boat to sail around the world.

“We were never like most families – or even like separated ones where you see your dad every other weekend and Wednesday nights,” she says. “There was a lot of flow between the UK and Australia. We’d go back and forth. I went to school there for a bit too. There were lots of us, and lots of parents involved – but none were at war. The most important thing was for everyone to love each other. They were hippies, basically.

“Dad was very charismatic, he had loads of energy. He played drums and was always in bands, going to gigs, then as I got older, he was very into sailing. He had a boat and twice I went sailing on six-week trips – we all loved to go sailing with him. He taught me how to navigate. We spent a lot of time doing amazing things – and we also talked about life and what a ‘good life’ is. Dad believed in living a full life, in following your passions and not being constricted by what society thinks you should do. We had so many conversations about the right way to be.”

Now Vashti wonders if her dad saw in her a kindred spirit. While her siblings had all settled close to him in Australia, she was always restless. Having left school at 16, she travelled across Europe, south-east Asia and Australia before working her way up in the film industry, producing commercials for clients such as Pepsi and Pizza Hut. “Maybe Dad saw me as a bit of an adventurer, like he was,” she says. “He knew I had a passion for travel – maybe he left me that money and that message because he thought I’d take it on as a project.”

Instead of making people dependent on aid, you give them a loan and set them up to stand on their own two feet

If so, he was right. After Johnny’s funeral, Vashti decided to go first to an orphanage in northern India to meet Deki Dolkha, a Tibetan refugee her father had sponsored as a child. “Dad had visited Deki twice and there were always letters and pictures going around,” says Vashti. “When I got there, she was 16 and had basic literacy. There were loads of girls in the same situation – they couldn’t stay where they were and they expected to be sent off around India to work as maids. My dad had sponsored her to give her a better life, but she still had no opportunities. We had an amazing week – I took her on fairground rides, to the chemist and bought her toiletries. I took the shoes off my feet and handed them to her – but when I got back to Bristol, I wanted to do something that would really make a difference. Sending money felt so disempowering.”

Vashti began to read about micro-finance – back then, a relatively new concept. “I knew it was the right way of doing it. Instead of making people dependent on aid, you give them a loan and set them up to stand on their own two feet. Everything fell into place. This was what I had to do with my life. I was going to set a charity up and help people like Deki.”

In 2008, the University of the West of England added an £8,000 grant to her dad’s £2,000 starter fund. The scheme began in Nepal, with Vashti’s mother as the chair and trustee – in fact, it was her idea to name it Deki. In 2009, the first loan was made – £50 to enable a tailor to buy a new sewing machine. “By then, I’d got together with my husband and had a baby under one arm and a laptop on the other, so it was a very slow start.”

Today, Deki is a thriving charity that invites individuals to browse the site and lend as little as £10 to their chosen entrepreneur. There’s a mother of five with £80 left to raise to expand her food business in Ghana, a father of four in Uganda who needs £400 to buy 10 cows … and many more. The site is inspirational to navigate and, once you do, it’s impossible not to be drawn in.

Just back from a whistle-stop tour of Ghana, Vashti has seen the difference Deki has made to communities. “Seeing the impact of those loans was so overwhelming, so emotional. I cried – and I thought about my dad a lot too. Maybe he saw something in me that I didn’t see but he was the catalyst. All my siblings have made Deki loans – and my mum is no longer a trustee so she’s one of our top lenders. All the family think it’s a great thing to have done – and they know it’s something Dad would have felt strongly about.

“Dad was a Buddhist – very much into reincarnation – so I hope he comes back as a free spirit! Whatever and wherever that might be we all know he’d be very proud.”

deki.org.uk