Trust
How we are built, funded, and governed.
Who we are
An independent Canadian research and granting organization.
We assess organizations and then direct people’s money, time, and skills to the ones that do the most good per dollar. That is the whole of it, and everything on this page exists so you can check that we do it.
The money is already here, and so is the will to give it, in far greater supply than most people assume. Our work is to direct it to the organizations that do the most good with it, and then to show you whether it got there.
Our partners
Better work keeps better company.
We work alongside like-minded organizations that hold the same standards for evidence and honesty.
Good Rises is our technology partner: the platform that makes giving simple and shows you what your giving achieved. The division is deliberate and we state it plainly. Harness Good does the search, the assessment, the selection, and the monitoring, and decides every grant. Good Rises does everything else.1
Charity Intelligence is an independent Canadian charity analyst we work alongside. We compare methods, share what each of us learns, and stress-test each other’s models, because analysis holds up best when someone you respect checks it.
How we spend
We spend for the most good, not the lowest cost.
Your donation funds the work: measuring what good work achieves, and directing money where it does the most good. It serves both sides, so you see the good your money does, and for-impact organizations get the funds, tools, and evidence they could not build alone.
We judge our own spending the way an investor judges any holding, by the return it produces rather than by how low the cost looks. Ours is social return: the same discipline, pointed at human outcomes instead of financial ones. Sometimes that means keeping costs tight; sometimes it means investing for the long term so the value keeps compounding. Cutting every cost to the bone is the short-term thinking that short-changes charities and the people they serve, so we spend wherever it earns the most good per dollar, and we show our math. Operating lean is part of how we get there: experts, working with always-on AI, assess organizations on what they actually achieve, at a depth and a cost neither could reach alone.
An independent board governs every dollar. Harness Good began operating in September 2026, so there is no filing to read yet: our financials and our annual filings will be published after our first year end.
Who governs it
The people accountable.
They were chosen one at a time, and chosen to be unalike: founders and operators, business minds from chemistry, logistics, law, and technology, so that a decision meets more than one kind of scrutiny before it is made. What they share is narrower and harder: integrity and excellence as uncompromising standards, and the conviction that values which bend under cost were never values at all.
Sumair Mirza
Chair, board member
Chair of the Harness Good board, and founder of Good Rises. Twenty years across financial services and the charitable sector, at GE Capital and Element Fleet, and as chief operating officer of a national charity, where he led the digital transformation behind a record fundraising year and a breakthrough transparency score.
David Au-Yeung
Board member
Co-founder of Flipp, the retail technology platform used by more than 100 million shoppers, which he helped grow past 450 employees before its sale in 2023. Founding partner of CollectiveXP, and a board member of Peoples Christian Academy.
David Garabedian
Board member
Partner at EY Law LLP, with more than fifteen years in United States immigration and nationality law, leading business immigration for corporate clients across professional services, technology, media, and telecommunications.
Chris Spanjaard
Board member
Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Purolator since 2017, responsible for operations across a courier and logistics company of 14,000 people. Earlier leadership at PostNL, TNT Express, and Celebi, and co-founder of SCG Consulting Group.
Lisa Studnicki Hunt
Board member
Co-founder of GL Chemtec International, a contract development and manufacturing organization she helped scale from its founding in 2002. PhD in organic polymer chemistry, with executive education at Harvard and MIT Sloan. A long-standing champion of the for-impact sector.
Who runs it
The Executive Director runs Harness Good day to day and answers to the board.
Josh Folkema
Executive Director, Harness Good
Leads Harness Good: its mission, its research programme, its granting, and the strategy that holds the three together. His background is impact measurement and social-return analysis. He was vice-president of product at a national charity, where he built its first impact-investing offering. MES, York University.
Protecting you
Your gift, guaranteed. Your information, guarded.
Five pledges, in terms you can hold us to: the gift is guaranteed, you decide what’s shared, your information is guarded like it matters, you stay in control, and we prove it, every year, in public.
Questions about money and your information: we answer them plainly →
1 Good Rises is built and operated by Harness Exchange Inc., a technology company. Harness Good is an independent charity, not a subsidiary. It uses the platform, the Good Score, and the Good Rises name at fair market value, and an independent board governs every dollar.