Goodwill Foundation: What's Happening?

May 2006 – White Paper

Goodwill Industries of Upstate/Midlands South Carolina, Inc. (GWI) has been in operation since 1973 and covers South Carolina from the Upstate to Columbia . The GWI administrative office is located at 115 Haywood Road , Greenville , SC , in a 65,000 square foot facility that also houses a Job Connection, Subway, central warehouse, and a distribution center. Presently GWI operates twenty stores, four Job Connections, and a Subway training center.

GWI annually serves about 4,500 people through employment training. Over 843 of these participate in GWI's 3-month training programs and 65% of those are able to obtain employment. The remainder encounters barriers that interfere with successful program completion. But, employment alone does not necessarily assure self-sufficiency, as many clients who successfully complete the GWI program and obtain employment will subsequently get tripped up in another area such as housing. There are significant opportunities to serve more people and to better affect self-sufficiency.

Through continued growth and success, GWI has achieved a consistent level of profitability in recent years. So GWI began to explore the idea of establishing a foundation through which it could donate a significant portion of its earnings and raise additional capital funds to create an endowment fund capable of addressing different needs with different means than GWI is in a position to do. Through the exploration of this concept, there has emerged the need and the opportunity to address the problems of overcoming the barriers to self-sufficiency in a holistic fashion.

The principal barriers to self-sufficiency are:

• Motivation/willingness/expectations
• Employment, to include training, etc.
• Affordable transitional housing
• Affordable childcare
• Affordable transportation
• Various social infrastructure components such as healthcare, education, etc.

Various agencies address different ones of these barriers, but there is a need and an opportunity to address these in a more coordinated and holistic manner.

So, out of this exploration of the possibilities for a foundation have emerged the following cornerstone beliefs:

• The need/desire to help those who are disabled and disadvantaged to successfully overcome the barriers to self-sufficiency is paramount.
• The approach to this need to be holistic.
• The most effective/efficient means of accomplishing a holistic approach is to develop an inter-agency approach and thereby avoid duplication of resources, efforts, etc.
• Turfism is a major barrier to interagency cooperation.
• GWF can amass capital – financial, human, leadership, influence, innovation, etc.
• GWF would be a source of capital – not an operating entity.
• GWF would have the ability to provide capital – financial and otherwise – to specific needs; GWF therefore would have the potential to promote, encourage and expect an environment of interagency cooperation – one that might not be able to exist otherwise.
• GWF should not do anything that can be done by GWI or by any other agency.
• It's important to create such a holistic environment on a systemic basis, one that can be consistently replicated, one with consistent and predictable results.

If such an approach can be accomplished, the benefits will be enormous, to include:

• Higher rates of success, lower rates of recidivism
• Ability to put more clients through the programs
• Increased motivation/expectation on the part of clients because of higher rates of success.
• More effective, efficient use of community resources.
• Fewer people requiring social assistance.

From this background, GWF has developed the following Vision Statement :

Self-Sufficiency is a state of mind and is the desired state of being for all people. Individuals and Society function best in this fashion. Goodwill Foundation will amass capital and other resources and leverage them with effective community organizations to develop holistic, innovative solutions to enable the Disabled and Disadvantaged to permanently and systemically overcome the barriers to self-sufficiency.

Within 10 years Goodwill Foundation will facilitate the development and employment of an innovative, systemic, holistic approach to enable the Disabled and Disadvantaged to permanently and predictably overcome the barriers to self-sufficiency. Through these efforts our innovative approach to self-sufficiency will be widely recognized as a national model and will be broadly emulated by other communities.

As this vision statement is embraced GWF will need to develop specific strategies, plans and programs to enable realization of the Vision. All strategies, plans and programs must be totally aligned with this Vision.

At the end of the day success will be measured not by how well GWF has done, but by how well the Community has done at developing, instituting, enhancing and maintaining a systemic, holistic approach to achieving self-sufficiency.

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