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Goodwill Industries International
Goodwill Industries International is a network of 207 community-based, autonomous member organizations in the United States, Canada, and twenty-two other countries. Each organization serves people with disabilities and disadvantages—such as homelessness, welfare dependency, and lack of education or work experience—by providing job training and employment services, as well as job placement opportunities and post-employment support.
Founded in Boston in 1902 by Methodist minister Edgar J. Helms, Goodwill Industries first put people to work by hiring them to repair and sell donated goods. Today, Goodwill Industries not only provides employment, it also trains people for careers in a variety of fields, including financial services, computer programming, and health care. To pay for its programs, Goodwill sells donated clothes and other household items in more than 2,000 retail stores and online at http://www.shopgoodwill.com. The organization also builds revenues 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 shredding. Since 1902, Goodwill Industries has helped more than 6 million people enter the workforce and support their families.
In 2002, of the more than 583,000 people who benefited from Goodwill's career services, 10,568 were homeless. More than sixty Goodwill agencies have specialized services to reach this population, many of them offered through partnerships with other nonprofit and private organizations and government agencies. Goodwill's goal is to help people move into stable employment by providing them with a wide range of support programs, including transitional housing, clothing vouchers, skills assessment, job search assistance, job retention skills, and help with transportation.
Program Successes
In West Palm Beach, Florida, Gulfstream Goodwill Industries provides transitional housing for up to two years for people who are homeless. Its thirty-bed program is funded through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Palm Beach County Division of Human Services, and offers job placement services, work adjustment training, vocational evaluation, life skills training, and case management. It started in 1996 and serves about 100 people in residential services annually. Participants have obtained jobs as hairdressers, telemarketers, landscapers, sales representatives, and truck drivers. In 2001 and 2003, Goodwill added two new HUD programs to provide permanent supported housing services for adults with disabilities who had been homeless. These programs serve twenty-four persons in their own apartments in scattered sites in their communities.
Since 2002, Wall Street Mission Goodwill Industries in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, has provided people who are homeless with social and employmentrelated skills and assistance, as well as referrals for housing. In the first eight months of operation, 103 people benefited from this program, 40 percent of them obtaining jobs in fields such as clerical, warehouse, production, and retail.
Goodwill Industries of Kentucky (Louisville), through Goodwill Temporary Services (GTS) staffing, operates a job program to help people who are homeless obtain housing through their employment. The program requires participants to attend two job search groups per week, be available for vocational assessment to evaluate employment aptitudes and skills, and maintain monthly contact with a job coach after employment. An important goal of the program is to match participants' work skills with the right jobs. Goodwill also helps with the cost of suitable interview clothes and provides transportation for one month after the client has been hired. In 2002, GTS staffing through the Kentucky Goodwill served 505 homeless people, compared with 116 in 2001.
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- Causes
- Cities
- Demography and Characteristics
- Health Issues
- History
- Housing
- Legal Issues, Advocacy, and Policy
- Lifestyle Issues
- Appendix 3: Directory of Street Newspapers
- Child Care
- Child Support
- Criminal Activity and Policing
- Encampments, Urban
- Libraries: Issues in Serving the Homeless
- Mobility
- Panhandling
- Parenting
- Prostitution
- Shelters
- Single-Room Occupancy Hotels
- Social Support
- Soup Kitchens
- Street Newspapers
- Survival Strategies
- Work on the Streets
- Organizations
- American Bar Association Commission on Homelessness and Poverty
- Association of Gospel Rescue Missions
- Corporation for Supportive Housing
- European Network for Housing Research
- FEANTSA
- Goodwill Industries International
- Homeless International
- International Network of Street Newspapers
- International Union of Tenants
- National Alliance to End Homelessness
- National Center on Family Homelessness
- National Coalition for the Homeless
- National Resource Center on Homelessness and Mental Illness
- Salvation Army
- UN-HABITAT
- Urban Institute
- Wilder Research Center
- Perceptions of Homelessness
- Appendix 1: Bibliography of Autobiographical and Fictional Accounts of Homelessness
- Appendix 2: Filmography of American Narrative and Documentary Films on Homelessness
- Autobiography and Memoir, Contemporary Homelessness
- Images of Homelessness in Contemporary Documentary Film
- Images of Homelessness in Narrative Film, History of
- Images of Homelessness in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century America
- Images of Homelessness in the Media
- Literature, Hobo and Tramp
- Photography
- Public Opinion
- Populations
- Research
- Service Systems and Settings
- “Housing First” Approach
- Assertive Community Treatment (ACT)
- Case Management
- Children, Education of
- Continuum of Care
- Family Separations and Reunifications
- Food Programs
- Foster Care
- Harm Reduction
- Health Care
- Homeless Assistance Services and Networks
- Housing, Transitional
- Interventions, Clinical
- Interventions, Housing
- Mental Health System
- Outreach
- Poorhouses
- Safe Havens
- Self-Help Housing
- Service Integration
- Shelters
- Single-Room Occupancy Hotels
- Soup Kitchens
- Work on the Streets
- Workhouses
- World Perspectives and Issues
- Australia
- Bangladesh
- Brazil
- Calcutta
- Canada
- Copenhagen
- Cuba
- Denmark
- Egypt
- France
- Germany
- Homelessness, International Perspectives on
- Housing and Homelessness in Developing Nations
- Indonesia
- Italy
- Japan
- London
- Montreal
- Mumbai (Bombay)
- Nairobi
- Netherlands
- Nigeria
- Paris
- Russia
- South Africa
- Spain
- Sweden
- Sydney
- Tokyo
- Toronto
- United Kingdom
- United Kingdom, Rural
- Zimbabwe
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