Changes @ Good Foundation Inc. … after 50 Years

Please be advised that for the immediate future, Good Foundation Inc. will not be accepting any unsolicited applications. While funding will continue as required by our charter and current government regulations, all funding will be at the initiation and instigation of the Directors of the Foundation. This notice supersedes any other information still on this website which is in the process of being revised in the context of this development. Some new information can now be found on the “Grants Made” page and under the grants listing for the fiscal year of 2023-24 and also 2024-25.

When and Where

Good Foundation is a small private Canadian foundation started in 1974 by the late Milton and Verna Good. It distributes funds to charitable organizations in communities of which family members are a part. The roots of the Foundation are in the Waterloo Region of Ontario, Canada, and the family now resides there and in London, Ontario.  A recent family move to Ottawa will eventually bring that area into play as well, but initially grants to that region will primarily be self identified by members there.  Requests from these areas do have an inside track. Our previous involvements with Victoria and British Columbia are now more or less on hold because of the “Speculation Tax” BC has placed on our Ontario members. [See Item under “News”]   However, “communities” can be more than geographically based entities and members have pursued both provincially and nationally areas of specific interest beyond any regional base.

What We Support

Our original mandate is quite broad in its direction to support and enrich the communities in which the Foundation’s members are involved. In its early years, it tried to spread its grants evenly over the categories of arts and culture, health, social services, research and publication, and education.  More recently demands have been such that we have narrowed our focus primarily to arts and culture with more or less token grants outside these areas.   Worthy requests from the health care sector in particular became quite overwhelming, and for well over a decade we have not considered appeals from hospitals or annual and on-going appeals from disease and condition-specific organizations.  The Foundation is quite public about its distributions and our full granting history is available on our “Grants Made” page here.  Reviewing our more recent grants is probably the best way to get a sense of what we support, keeping in mind that those grants seemingly outside our general parameters are best explained by specific member interest or connection.

Please Note: Canadian private charitable foundations can legally donate only to “Qualified Donees” as defined by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA). The following is a link to the CRA definition of eligibility:   “Qualified Donee ” (Click Here).  We have no ability to award funds outside of these government regulations.

Grant Amounts

Available grant funds for 2022 have now been assigned. We will start to  look at new requests in December of 2022 and January of 2023.  Grants have recently been made from as low as $1,500 to as high as $500.000, the latter over multiple years.  Since 1974 the Foundation has made 751 grants totalling almost $8,000,000 with a median of $4,000 and an average of $10,559. The median since 2001 has been $5,000 and the average $15,037.  Your best guide for applications is  to check our grants list and see what organizations have been receiving for specific types of projects.

Grant Types

Our primary focus is on one-time grants to support charitable organizations for particular projects, special opportunities, or non-recurring situations.  Ideally, these can be covered by single payments in a given year—our “regular grants.”

A second type of grant is an extension of the above, but happens where the project is spread over a longer time or is too large for our annual budget.   In these cases the payments are annualized—our “multi-year grants.”  A variation of the multi-year grant is an “upfront multi-year grant” in which a single initial payment covers a project lasting more than one year.

A final type of grant is a “special grant.” These grants occur outside our request framework, may occur at any time, and are often the result of a directed donation to the Foundation of cash or securities. (eg. a flow-through grant is a type of “special grant” where funds have been donated towards a specific cause.)  They may or may not be included as a part of our regular donation budget. “Special grants” are entirely at the initiation and discretion of the Foundation’s Directors.

The Foundation can provide a further service to charitable agencies we support.  Anybody can make a donation of a publicly traded security to Good Foundation Inc. and receive a CRA acceptable charitable receipt from us. These funds will then be donated in full to the charity designated by the donor of the security, who may choose either to receive the recognition for the gift or to remain anonymous. Grants made under these conditions are considered flow-through or sponsored grants under the “special grant” category above.

Preferred Means of Communication

The Foundation communicates through e-mail, and supplementary documentation can be submitted with attached files, preferably pdf files which are easy to forward to members.  Regular mail submissions are awkward for us because all material has to be reprocessed digitally for  distribution.  Regular mail submissions with no attached digital addresses will usually be ignored.