Goodwill Industries

Beginnings and Goals

Goodwill was founded in 1902 in Boston, Massachusetts, by the Methodist clergyman Edgar Helms. Helms had come to Boston in the late [Page 327]1890s to minister to Polish, Italian, and German immigrants, many of them converts from Catholicism. He settled at Boston's South End Memorial Chapel, which had been established in 1859 by Henry Morgan, a renegade Methodist missionary. In 1900, Helms began to go door-to-door to collect unwanted clothing and household goods from wealthy Bostonians. According to official histories, parishioners were too proud to accept the items as handouts, preferring instead to refurbish and sell them. This formed the core of the Goodwill mission: to aid the poor via the redemptive quality of work, offering a hand up, not a handout. This model of welfare provision had strong roots in Protestant Christian doctrine, which emphasized vocation as central to the individual's relation to God. It contrasted with Catholic models of charity premised on giving alms. In this regard, Goodwill, along with other Protestant charities originating in this period, brought religion, welfare, commerce, and recycling of materials together in a working institutional model.

Spread and Secularization

In the following decades, hundreds of affiliated Goodwills were established across the United States under the loose administration of the Goodwill national office. After World War I, as disabled servicemen returned home, the organization began outreach to the physically handicapped. Goodwill worked closely with the National Recovery Association throughout the Great Depression and supported federal initiatives during World War II to gather small quantities of scrap to support the nation's war economy. Goodwill began a long process of secularization in the 1940s, both as a result of factionalism within Methodism and in response to federal funding requirements. It prospered in the 1950s and 1960s as booms in material production channeled increasingly short-lived goods toward donation.

Recycling

Goodwill's relationship to recycling since the 1970s has been complex. Prior to 1970, Goodwills had at times collected both reuseable and recyclable commodities, competing with the for-profit rag and paper scrap industries. With the emergence of urban recycling as an activity whose goals included saving the Earth, along with job creation and urban order, Goodwill began to redefine some—though not most—of its mission to include environmental considerations. Throughout the 1970s, Goodwills in some states established recycling drop-off centers for glass, metal, and plastic containers. These programs were small-scale and short-lived as markets for recycled commodities plummeted through the 1980s. By the latter part of that decade, municipal curbside recycling programs were beginning to proliferate, as were container deposit laws in some states, making Goodwill's involvement in recycling collections redundant.

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