Your favourite local paper is giving local charities the chance to take a share of a whopping £125k cash giveaway.

Our parent company’s charitable arm, The Gannett Foundation, is providing £125k in cash to support local charities across the country and we are delighted to have a £20k share to give away in our area.

And we want YOU to decide where this money should be spent.

Today we’re asking readers to nominate their favourite local charities to be considered for a grant.

Last year's recipients of a charitable donation from the Gannett Foundation was The Prout Bridge Project in Beaminster, which was awarded £2,000 for its Phoenix Youth Band.

Previous recipients have included Chideock Village Hall, which received £4,000 to refurbish its kitchen and Portland-based disabled sailing charity Chesil Sailability, which received £1,100 to support solo sailing. Another water-based recipient was the Weymouth-based Friends of M.V Freedom. which received £1,200 to help people with disabilities get closer to the sea.

Making a nomination couldn’t be easier – simply go to www.dorsetecho.co.uk/readerschoice and fill in your nomination form or you can write to us, confirming the name and address of the charity you’d like to nominate and why to: Readers’ Choice Cash For Charity Nominations, Fleet House, Hampshire Road, Weymouth, DT4 9XD by the closing date of Sunday, October 3 2021.

Once all nominations have been received, our editor will select eight of the most popular local charities to be featured in this year’s grants scheme.

We’re then going to put the power to allocate the cash back into the hands of our readers – for four weeks, readers will be invited to collect tokens from our newspapers which can then be sent to collection points across our region or posted.

Each token collected will then be used to allocate cash to the nominated charity – so if your favourite charity collects 50% of all to tokens collected, it will receive 50% of the £20,000!