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Goodwill Industries International is a network of autonomy community-based organizations providing job training and employment services to people with work place disadvantages and disabilities in 25 countries.
Goodwill Industries includes in their corporate values statement diversity and dignity for all people. Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, the organization is not directly affiliated with any one organized religion.
Business
Goodwill Industries International is a network of community-based, autonomous member organizations in the United States, Canada, and 22 other countries. Goodwill provides job training and career services to people with disabilities, welfare recipients, dislocated workers and other job seekers. The organization trains people for careers in fields such as financial services, computer programming and health care. Since its founding in 1902, more than 8 million people have benefited from Goodwill's employment programs.
To pay for its programs, Goodwill collects and sells donated clothes, shoes, furniture and other items in its 2,015 stores and on its Internet auction site shopgoodwill.com. The organization also earns revenue and creates jobs by contracting with businesses and government to provide a wide range of commercial services, including janitorial work, packaging and assembly, food service preparation, and document management and destruction. Diebold, Kimberly-Clark, and the U.S. Air Force are among those who have tapped into Goodwill's services.
To mark its centennial in 2002, Goodwill launched an international development project--the Goodwill Industries 21st Century Initiative--to help 20 million people enter the workforce and move up the career ladder by the year 2020.
History
Goodwill Industries was founded in Boston's South End by Reverend Edgar J. Helms, a Methodist minister assigned to the mission of Morgan Chapel. Helms put people in need--many of them considered unemployable--to work by hiring them to collect, repair and sell donated goods. Although the name Goodwill Industries would not be coined until 1915, 1902 became known as the year Goodwill Industries was officially born.
The Goodwill Mission is thus a "a hand up, not a hand out" or "a chance, not a charity". Helms said it was an "industrial program as well as a social service enterprise ... a provider of employment, training and rehabilitation for people of limited employability, and a source of temporary assistance for individuals whose resources were depleted." So, instead of giving handouts, donated goods were sold for profit and that money is used to pay workers, who otherwise might not have jobs.
With the Methodist church backing expansion, by 1920 there were 15 Goodwill organizations, including Morgan Memorial. In subsequent decades, the relationship with the church would gradually lessen as Goodwill sought leaders from outside the ministry, and as federal funding requirements made it necessary for Goodwill to become a more secular organization.
Today, the organization has grown into a global network of 205 independent, community-based agencies in the United States and abroad. In 2005, the organization reported revenues of $2.65 billion, of which 83 percent are channeled into Goodwill's career programs. More than 846,000 people benefited from Goodwill programs in 2005, and 129,899 people were placed in good jobs outside Goodwill. That translates to someone placed in a job every 57 seconds of every business day.
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References
Charities based in the United States | International charities | Social welfare charities
"Goodwill Industries"