About us
We started because walking past stopped working.
Goodward Foundation exists to sit with the part of the problem most people step around. We work with people experiencing homelessness and extreme poverty wherever they are, and we stay involved past the point where the photographs stop being useful.
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How we work
Four rules we hold ourselves to.
They are deliberately awkward. Each one costs us money or makes fundraising harder, which is roughly how you can tell they are real.
01
No means test at the door
We do not ask people to document their suffering before we feed them. Every form you put between a hungry person and a meal is a person who stops coming.
02
Everywhere, not somewhere
Poverty does not respect a map. We fund a borehole in one country and a night van in another, because the question is never where someone is — it is what they need tonight.
03
Show up again
One visit is a gesture. Twenty visits is a relationship, and a relationship is the thing that eventually makes someone accept help. We budget for the twentieth visit.
04
Publish the failures
Projects go wrong. Wells silt up, partners disappoint, plans meet reality. We report those alongside the wins, because donors cannot judge us on a highlight reel.
The uncomfortable part
Nobody ends their own homelessness from a doorway.
The advice people offer — get a job, get an address, get your papers in order — assumes a starting point that a person sleeping rough does not have. You cannot open a bank account without an address, rent an address without a bank account, or hold either without ID you lost two winters ago.
Breaking that loop is unglamorous, administrative, and slow. It is most of what we actually do.