Good Foundation Inc. is a small private Canadian foundation, started in 1974 by the late Milton and Verna Good, which distributes funds to charitable organizations in the communities of which family members are a part.

Where

The roots of the Foundation are in the Waterloo Region and the family now resides there and in London, Ontario, Canada, and requests from these areas have an inside track. Foundation Members outside these two centres (Toronto, for example) largely self identify opportunities.  However, “communities” can be more then geographically based entities and members have pursued both provincially and nationally specific areas of interest.

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 annual and on-going appeals from disease and condition-specific organizations.  The Foundation is quite public about its distributions and our 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 seemingly outside our general parameters are best explained by specific member interest or connection.

Can I apply for a grant?

Strictly speaking, no. All grants at this time are member initiated or sponsored, and applications are by invitation only. That said, it is possible, by e-mail, to bring a project to the attention of Foundation members, particularly if your organization is London or Waterloo, Ontario, focused.   Click on “Granting Procedure” in the side bar for these details.

Please Note: Before bringing any project to the attention of the Foundation, please check that you are a “Qualified Donee ” (Click Here).  We have no ability to award funds outside of these government regulations.

The Foundation has no professional staff and operates through the voluntary efforts of family members.

Directors’ Meeting, April 7th

At the meeting of April 7th, the Directors approved in principle 12 grants and decided not to follow up on approximately the same number.  All organizations involved have been notified of the results of this meeting.

Grants For 2013-14

- May 5, 2013

We have now issued cheques for approximately  $200,000 of the grants payable in the 2013-14 fiscal year and a further $80,000 or so has been committed.   A listing of the new grants is on our “Grants Made” page.  As of this date, less  than $20,000 of granting funds remain available for assignment, and some of this is semi-committed. In short, our granting period for the 2013-14 is virtually over.

Another Major Grant in 2012-13

- February 3, 2013

Edna Mae Good Ruibal died on January 10, 2013, in her 100th year. She was one of seven siblings of Milton R. Good, of whom only two remain, Vera Good and Harold  Good.  It was Edna’s wish that the majority of her estate go to the Viola Good International Scholarship Fund founded in the 1980′s by her sister at Goshen College in Indiana.  These funds have come to the Foundation and will be redistributed according to Edna’s wishes with a grant of $100,000 to Goshen College for this International Scholarship, a grant that will more than double the existing endowment of about $85,000 US.   The Foundation has made two previous grants to this scholarship, one (#112) in 1986 for $14,062 and another  (#238) in 1994 for $50,000.   This grant will not affect the amounts available for regular GFI distributions in 2012-13 or 2013-14, but will be in addition.

Receipts For 2012-13 Grants

- March 19, 2013

With the exception of one recently sent grant  for which we do not consider the receipt late, we have received receipts for all grants paid this year.  Thank you.

New Website

- April 5, 2012

The closing of Apple’s MobileMe has forced the Foundation to find a new web host, and this is the new site. The template has changed which has improved the look and organization of the site, but the information is essentially the same. There is something of a learning curve and the site is still in progress, but it should be even easier to keep the material up to date.  Thank you Jonathan Rivard.

A Major Item For Us

- March, 2011

An agreement has been signed with Conrad Grebel University College at the University of Waterloo for the naming of its library: The Milton Good Library.  This naming opportunity will occur in the context of our largest ever commitment, a grant of $500,000 over five years; it also involves a matching grant from a source that prefers to remain anonymous, but to whom we are very grateful.  This grant will obviously have an effect on the amounts available for other projects starting in 2011-12, but we are hoping to increase somewhat our grant payouts.

The Foundation’s connection to CGUC can be found by going to the “Grants Made” page and clicking on any Grebel grant.

• GFI can grant only to organizations who can issue charitable receipts acceptable to the Canada Revenue Agency, although these are not necessarily identical to tax receipts given to individual donors.  Receipts from other government agencies may also be acceptable. Individuals must be sponsored by or work through such organizations or agencies so that proper receipts can be issued. (For CRA definition, click here.)

•  Organizations that have not provided proper followup for past grants will not be considered. (For a list of ineligible organizations so the bottom of the “Granting Procedure” page.)

•  GFI’s focus is highly regional. Chances of interesting members in local projects outside of the London and Waterloo regions in Ontario are slim. Provincial, national, and international grants are possible, but have been done mainly through organizations which have a regional presence, or in cases where members have a direct connection to the organization or project.

•  Support for one-time events or projects is more likely than requests for on-going operating funding leading to annual requests. We do recognize that some worthwhile endeavours require only annual operating funds and we will sometimes consider one-time multi-year requests, but not on-going annual commitments to operating budgets.

•  GFI does not support disease or condition specific medical organizations, worthy as they may be.

•  Conventions, conferences, seminars and deficits are not normally supported.

•  GFI does not normally contribute to endowment funds unless the fund has been initiated by the Foundation or its members or it is in support of a project we have funded.

•  Although the charter of the Foundation speaks of grants for “charitable, religious, and educations purposes,” in practice, the Foundation records its grants under the following categories: Arts; Education; Health; Heritage; and Social Services. For various reasons, our focus is now more on Arts, Culture, and Heritage.  NB: The Foundation has never granted funds for specifically religious purposes, although in many instances religious organizations have proved the best vehicles for furthering social, heritage, or artistic projects.

• GFI has made grants from $200 to $500,000 but requests at either end of that spectrum are neither practical (low end) nor realistic (high end).  Particularly at the upper end, the  grants were dictated by very special circumstances.  Check carefully the “Grants Made”  recent sections for a sense of what the Foundation is currently doing.

•  E-Mail is the best means of contact since regular mail sometimes accumulates at the London address and all items circulated are through digital means. The Foundation’s answering machine goes unchecked when the family is not in residence.

•  GFI’s fiscal year is April 1 to March 31; it is significant because funds become available on April 1 and are assigned and distributed until disbursement quotas are reached. NB:  We  have now (July, 2012) concluded the selection of projects for 2012-13.

• GFI would be defined as a “small” (under $10,000,000) private foundation. It now distributes up to $250,000 a year, far less that the opportunities it recognizes and the requests it receives.

Full Application Materials

• a brief description of the organization’s history and objectives, although this can be minimized for organizations known to us
• the purpose of the grant and the aims of the project
• a financial budget for the project showing expected sources of funds and items of expense
• a copy of the organization’s most recent financial statements, audited where possible
• the membership of the Board of Directors and a list of officers

Since its 1974 beginnings and now with its completed 39th fiscal year, the Foundation has made 517 grants amounting to $4,203,392 of which $362,000 remains outstanding.

The median of the 517  grants is $2,500, and the average is $8,130. However, of the grants made since 2001, the median is $5,000, and the average is $13,949–but the averages are skewed by two or three large grants. None of these statistics includes 2013 grants.

Our fiscal year is April 1st to March 31st and most grants are awarded in the first part of the fiscal year. Thus, “2011 Grants,” for example, lists grants for the 2011-12 fiscal year, but all grants were in fact made in 2011.

Total Grant Information to April 30, 2012

For inquiries or to bring your project to the attention of the Foundation, contact the President, James (Jim) Good, at the following e-mail address. Or, you may contact any other member of the Foundation, should you be acquainted with him or her, in order to bring your request to the attention of our organization.

Should you have occasion to refer to the Foundation in print or on the web, the correct legal name is “Good Foundation Inc.”   We do have a logo in various forms. The full “logo plus” gives not only the the Foundation name but refers to the founders and the date established. It works in situations where the size is large enough to permits the details to be seen.   The second version is the Foundation’s legal name and is equally acceptable and often easier to insert.  Both version are in black and white and colour, in large and medium “.tiff” files, and in small “jpg” files usually big enough for web listings. There are also  .ESP files for each which, according to the designer is a, ”scalable vector format – good if you needed to ever produce something large like a banner.”  He adds that “the EPS is basically the ‘master copy’ from which other sizes should be made if you want to do it yourself.”

To download a particular file click on its description for the link.

 

There is also a small inverse image which can be copied and pasted: