Guidestar, the world’s largest and most compete source of information on nonprofit organizations, includes our profile, which is “platinum” rated for transparency.
The CEO’s salary is set by the board of directors’ Compensation Committee, which considers benchmarking studies of comparable positions as well as the scope of responsibilities for our Goodwill. Duties include leading a values-based organization with 1,430 associates, a $79,000,000 operating budget, and a wide variety of state, federal and local regulatory and compliance requirements. Our CEO’s earnings total less than 0.65% of our annual operating budget.
Goodwill’s mission centers on helping people who face challenges to securing and retaining employment. We work with Virginia’s Dept. of Aging and Rehabilitative Services to provide vocational programs to train and employ people with intellectual and/or physical disabilities. Goodwill’s Group Supported Employment Program provides employment opportunities and ongoing supervision to individuals with documented disabilities in an integrated employment setting. Group Supported Employment employees work with Goodwill skills trainers who help to assess their abilities, develop career plans, coordinate with their families and caregivers, and provide positive reinforcement and coaching. These associates start at $7.75 per hour and work 25 hours per week.
We also offer Individual Supported Employment, a program in which our skills trainers meet with clients at their (non-Goodwill) workplaces, help facilitate communication or concerns with their employers, and ensure that they have the supports to remain independently employed. This program is supported by the Virginia Department for Aging and Rehabilitative Services (DARS).
The Curran myth has been debunked numerous times, including this 2017 update from Snopes, a well-regarded internet fact-checking source. Goodwill Industries International Inc.’s official statement on the false information can also be found on its website.
The reality is that retail thrift shoppers generally do not purchase donated clothing that is stained, ripped or missing a button. (Well, here’s a fun exception. A Hollywood production needed a bunch of clothes to be scattered around a plane crash set, so the condition of the clothes was not important. The set designer bought several cart-loads at our outlet and barely inspected the items!) We bundle and sell those less-than-perfect textiles – which have commodity pricing of pennies per pound – through brokers in North America who re-sell them to recyclers and other distributors. Recycled textiles can be found in asphalt, garden furniture and insulation, just to name a few of the innovative uses. Other items we recycle include books (after we let school librarians take their picks for free), electronics, metal, cardboard and plastics. Last year our Goodwill kept nearly 1,000,000 pounds of electronics out of landfills. We repair and resell them through our two E-Recycle stores, after removing all data from computer hard drives, of course. We ship unusable electronics to Dell Reconnect facilities where they are disassembled even further to recycle parts and keep toxic materials out of the environment. If you’d like to learn more, consider taking a Goodwill Works tour.
We work with people one-on-one to provide assessments, career planning, skills training, coaching, resume writing and interview preparation. We also work with employers to learn about their cultures and hiring needs, and we maintain an active database of available employment opportunities. We want them to acquire the skills needed to become employable and enjoy career growth. To ensure sustained employment, we offer 12 months of personal success coaching to help people navigate and address challenges that may jeopardize their new employment. Our mission is changing lives…helping people help themselves through the power of work. We believe that work is a foundation for empowering individuals, strengthening families and building prosperous communities.
Cathode Ray Tube televisions are expensive to recycle and virtually impossible to sell in our retail stores. Accepting these as donations would be expensive to process and dispose of them properly, thus would have a negative impact on funding for mission services.