We’re transforming ourselves to meet the needs of a dynamic marketplace

For more than 95 years, our Goodwill has worked to help people with disabilities or disadvantaging conditions become more employable by providing work, skill training and job placement in the community. We’ve provided tens of thousands of participants with on-the-job training and access to entry-level jobs both inside and outside of our walls.

We thought you’d like to know about an important shift in our organization’s direction and thinking in recent years — and how it’s shaping our outlook for the years ahead.

In 2005, Goodwill embarked on an intensive process to revisit its mission and vision in the current social, governmental and economic context. We examined the widening income disparity between the haves and have nots, the declining public support for the poor and the changing needs of the business community. We looked within our own walls at the successes and challenges of our participants. As a result of these analyses, our board unanimously adopted a bold new mission and vision that move beyond employment to move the needle on poverty itself.

Our mission:
Goodwill creates solutions to poverty through the businesses we operate.

Our vision:
We envision a world free of poverty where people have the power to support themselves and their families, live in safe and thriving communities and actively care for the environment.

Implementing this mission and working toward our vision requires significant transformation of Goodwill’s very fabric — the way we serve participants and the way we manage our business operations. In effect, Goodwill is undergoing an extraordinary organizational transformation that is comparable to the change occurring in our participants and employees.

Like our participants, Goodwill must transform itself to meet the needs of a dynamic marketplace. Like our participants, Goodwill is embarking on a new path toward sustainability and away from reliance on the public purse. And like our participants, our success in achieving this transformation will position Goodwill as an agent of change at multiple levels, challenging deeply rooted views about the inevitability of multigenerational poverty and showing the business community that investing in its workforce is a sound — and essential — business strategy.

At this juncture, Goodwill is also similar to our participants in our recognition of the need for help. While we are cognizant of the strength of our legacy and existing operational platform, we will need additional support and expertise to effectively leverage these assets toward a new paradigm.

In the fall of 2006, Goodwill’s Board of Directors approved our new strategy: workforce creation through our environmental value recovery business platform. There are two critical elements to this strategy.

Workforce creation as a key to poverty alleviation

To move the needle on poverty, we must help create a workforce that has the necessary skills and capacities to successfully contribute in today’s marketplace. Within Goodwill’s own businesses, we must provide participants with the training and development necessary to obtain good jobs and advance in their careers. To this end, we have started to develop a new human development model that prepares our participants for success in work and career advancement. We envision that this model will enable us to serve a variety of people, and thus accommodate the inevitable shifts in our population base — and the needs of the communities we serve. This will be possible by developing a service platform based on personal transformation of the men and women seeking our programming rather than through barrier remediation.

Based on our research and our own experience, we’ve begun developing a model based on the following key principles:

Stages of transformation: We will support the internal transformation that our participants and staff go through as they move from their initial commitment to make a change through the development of a long-term orientation toward career advancement and individual sustainability.

Strength-based eligibility: Rather than determine participant eligibility by the barriers people face, our assessment process will emphasize individuals’ key strengths — the readiness to change toward work and the willingness to invest in themselves.

Contextual learning: Our enterprises will become the heart of human capital development for participants and employees alike by integrating skill development (hard, soft, basic and life) into our operations.

Shared responsibility and support: The individual and organization must work together to effect both individual transformation and organizational sustainability. Participants will be Goodwill employees as part of their transformative process.

Common process across business operations: We recognize this process of human transformation as a core business process that is woven into the business enterprises that we will operate.

The nexus between person and place: We recognize the reciprocity between transformation and sustainability of the individual and the neighborhood they identify with, and will work to develop new opportunities in neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty.

We anticipate that our core workforce creation activities will be further strengthened by building strategic partnerships to support our participants and supporting neighborhood businesses that share our commitment to this work.

Environmental value recovery

Critical to our new strategy is our commitment that our businesses will serve as the platform for all of Goodwill’s activities and impacts. The term “value recovery” typically refers to processes that extract value from used products, whether they be old computers, last year’s fashions, chemicals in the waste stream or even underperforming financial assets. In the Goodwill context, value recovery is used to describe our portfolio of businesses. Our enterprises extract value from the millions of pounds of donations that we divert from landfill each year through resale, recycling or repurposing.

While retail has long been considered the heart of Goodwill’s business activities, it is in fact only one part of our environmental value recovery business portfolio. Given our extensive experience with recycling and repurposing of goods, we believe that Goodwill is excellently positioned to significantly expand our environmental value recovery enterprises and become a leader in the green economy, which is exploding across the country and has been hailed as the future of the Bay Area’s economic growth. In addition, the types of careers offered in the emerging green collar sectors represent a good fit for our participants — and an excellent opportunity to simultaneously address the critical problems of poverty and environmental crisis.

Our new strategy of workforce creation through our businesses also necessitates a new model. Goodwill has committed to become an “embedded” social enterprise in which our social programs and business activities are one and the same. This is a significant departure from Goodwill’s more traditional “integrated” model, in which Goodwill enterprises have supported participant services financially — and as a job placement — but not as an integrated partner in terms of participant training and development. As an embedded social enterprise, Goodwill will be best positioned to integrate and leverage our core processes of human capital development and environmental value recovery. In this way, value transformation and recovery describes not only our business activities, but also our philosophy: the idea that the people — and items — that come through our door have undiscovered value to society.