About the Foundation
A society formed to keep the record.
Lionheart Foundation is a not-for-profit society incorporated in British Columbia, Canada in December 2025 under Society No. S0084064. We work in public education and advocacy on the harm institutions cause when they act without restraint.
Why we exist
The harm we study is rarely counted, because of who causes it.
Medicine has a word for injury caused by treatment. Iatrogenic. The word exists because doctors needed a way to name the damage they themselves did, and because the damage stayed invisible until it had a name.
We borrow the word and widen it. Iatrogenic cultural harm is injury produced by the institutions a society sets up to prevent injury. Schools, agencies, professional bodies, courts, health systems, charities. Bodies that hold real authority over people's lives and hold it in the name of protection.
This harm is difficult to see and harder to raise. It arrives wrapped in good intentions and careful language. The people who cause it are usually sincere. The institutions that house it measure themselves by what they meant rather than by what happened, and a person who says otherwise is treated as ungrateful or unwell.
Authority without restraint damages what it claims to protect, however benevolent it believes itself to be.
The Foundation exists because somebody has to write that down carefully, in public, and keep writing it down. Not as grievance and not as campaign, but as a record that holds up when it is examined.
Our purposes
These are the three purposes the Foundation was incorporated to pursue, reproduced word for word from the constitution filed with British Columbia in December 2025.
| Purpose one | To examine, confront, and bring public accountability to iatrogenic cultural and systemic harm that arises when institutional authority abdicates integrity, responsibility, and restraint. |
|---|---|
| Purpose two | To promote moral clarity, evidence-based inquiry, and long-term societal well-being by emphasizing accountability to impact over intention across cultural, legal, educational, medical, and social institutions. |
| Purpose three | To engage in research, dialogue, publication, and convening that support institutional integrity, cultural coherence, and the protection of foundational human relationships and developmental realities. |
Sovereignty, in the phrase we were formed around, has a narrow meaning. It is the ordinary authority a person or a family holds over their own life, and the presumption that this authority stays with them unless there is a real and demonstrated reason to remove it. Most of the harm we look at begins the moment that presumption gets reversed quietly, without anybody deciding to reverse it.
The third purpose names our four methods directly: research, dialogue, publication, and convening. Those are described in detail on the our work page, and we hold ourselves to them rather than to a wider claim.
How we hold the line
No institution pays us to be gentle
We take no funding from the bodies we examine, and we do not accept work whose terms would decide the finding in advance.
Impact over intention
We ask what happened to the person. What the institution intended is recorded, then set aside.
We apply our own standard first
An organisation that names other people's overreach has to be governed carefully itself. Ours is set out on the accountability page.
Our limits
Clarity requires an honest boundary of its own.
The Foundation holds a deliberately narrow remit, and the full statement of what falls outside it sits on the home page under the heading what we are not. It is worth reading before you write to us, because it will save you time if what you need is something we cannot give.
In short: no counselling, treatment, or care; no individual casework, legal advice, or medical advice; and no work whose purpose is to comfort an institution or manage its reputation.
If you are in immediate danger, please contact your local emergency service. In Canada, the Suicide Crisis Helpline can be reached at 988, at any hour of any day.
Where to go next
Our work
The three activities the Foundation actually carries out, and how each one is done.
Read what we doAccountability
Our registration, the conflict rule that governs who may rule on what, and how we correct ourselves when we are wrong.
See the record