New Opportunities
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By Chris Petersen   
Sunday, 01 July 2007
smc Goodwill Industries helps local businesses and the unemployed in central Indiana with new educational and retail initiatives.
Goodwill Industries helps local businesses and the unemployed in central Indiana with new educational and retail initiatives.
Opportunities can sometimes be hard to come by, and Goodwill Industries has been providing them for the disadvantaged and employers for decades. The organization, best known for its retail resale stores, provides much more to the community than what can be found in its stores, says Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana President Jim McClelland. As a provider of employment services and job preparation training to thousands of people without the skills to find work on their own, Goodwill fills a vital role in the economies of its communities.

In the past few years, Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana has made one monumental change in its approach to job preparation by founding its own charter high school in Indianapolis. In addition, the organization has made several smaller changes to its retail operations to strengthen what McClelland calls “the financial backbone for the entire organization” by embracing the Internet as a sales tool and creating new outlets for the sale of last-chance items that are donated to it.

Above all else, McClelland says, these new initiatives are giving Goodwill an even greater platform from which to enact its core objectives, which it has been doing in central Indiana since 1930. “There are four ways that I think this organization adds value in the lives of individuals in the community,” he says. The first is hiring people directly to work for the organization’s retail stores and other mission-enhancing businesses. The second is helping the unemployed find work, while at the same time providing strength to local employers. “We’re entering into a relationship where we provide a service for a company,” he says. “We want to help make that company successful.”

Goodwill’s third focus is to help individuals upgrade their education and skill levels to make them more desirable to employers and provide better value to them. The fourth way Goodwill serves the community and business is through the Indianapolis Metropolitan High School, which the organization opened three years ago.

Starting Young
McClelland says the idea to open a charter high school for students who have dropped out or are on the verge came in the mid-1990s. For many years, the majority of the people Goodwill helped place into jobs were disabled, but about 20 years ago, the organization also began helping people on public assistance become employed. McClelland says Goodwill discovered that many of the people receiving public assistance had not graduated from high school, and their employment options were very limited.

In the late 1990s, Goodwill became involved with small-scale initiatives within the Indianapolis Public School system, and recognized the impact a high school diploma could have in the lives of many of the people it was trying to help place in employment. In 2004, Goodwill established its charter high school, which focuses largely on helping students for whom traditional education hasn’t succeeded.

The school recently graduated its first five students, three of whom he says were unlikely to receive a diploma from the traditional school system. All five of the school’s first graduates have plans for either college or employment, McClelland says. Next year, the school expects to graduate about 70 students.

New Way of Learning
What makes Indianapolis Metropolitan High School more successful for these high school students is its educational model, which was developed in Providence, R.I., by The Big Picture Co. “We’re not only providing a different option, but we’re also demonstrating a different approach to take with kids that others might have given up on,” McClelland says.

With an eventual capacity of about 500, Indianapolis Metropolitan High School is structured around closer interaction between students and teachers. Students work in a cluster of 14 to 16 that stays together throughout all four years of high school. These clusters are moderated by one teacher known as an advisor. The key advantage to this system is that students feel more like a part of a team than individuals adrift in the educational system.

“They become a second family to each other, and in some cases, a first family,” McClelland says. Each student has his or her own individualized education plan that is tailored to their personal educational needs by advisors.

The school’s COO, Scott Bess, says the curriculum is flexible, depending on the student, but concentrates on what he calls “the new Three Rs: relationships, relevance and rigor,” Bess says. “

Real-World Experience
Although much of the focus at Goodwill’s school is placed on students receiving a high school education, what happens to them after graduation is of equal concern. Two days out of the week, students work outside of the school on unpaid internships for local businesses. McClelland says the internships are based on students’ interests and are incorporated into their educational plans so that the lessons they learn in class mesh with their work outside.

“Even if a kid is working in a beauty salon, there are so many things out of that that we can tie academic things to,” Bess says. For example, he notes, a student whose internship was in a veterinary clinic was tasked with researching wait times and revenue for each type of visit.

“There’s some pretty heavy algebra involved in that, and it involves the student doing some research here,” Bess says. The student expressed an interest in working with animals but had been struggling with math applications.

“[This was] a great example of a project that was beneficial to the business but really forced the student to dive deep into a subject that they wouldn’t have been interested in,” he says.

The benefit to students is a wealth of real-world experience that is relevant to their high school work, but the internship program pays dividends to the businesses involved, as well. “There’s two pieces to it,” Bess says. “One is really obvious. They have things that they need to have done, and they don’t have the resources to get it done.

“The secondary benefit that our mentors talk about more than the first is … the organizations are always talking about the state of education in our city, and being a mentor gives them the opportunity to do something about it directly,” Bess continues.

A Solid Foundation
The success of the charter school to date has been due in no small part to the experience and strength of Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana, McClelland says. “What Goodwill brought to [the charter school concept] was a strong support services infrastructure,” he says. The school’s administration is free to focus on helping students instead of worrying about cash flow, thanks to Goodwill’s healthy resale stores.

Goodwill’s retail operations are growing steadily in the Indianapolis region, McClelland says. There are currently 35 retail stores in the city and surrounding area, employing more than 1,100 people. Goodwill’s work force has increased by more than 800 in the past year alone, with most of the increase occurring in the retail and secondary market operations. McClelland attributes this to the organization’s drive for constant improvement on the retail side, combining minor tweaks with bold new steps. “It’s a combination of evolutionary improvements and more revolutionary innovations,” he says.

Finding New Avenues
One such improvement was an idea developed by Goodwill in Portland, Ore. That organization established warehouse and outlet locations that sold off poor-selling donations by the pound. Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana Vice President of Retail Operations Kent Kramer says the concept has yielded two outlet stores in Indianapolis with plans for a third in the works.

“It’s made us more efficient and better stewards of the donations we’ve received,” Kramer says. “In the past, before we had the outlets, if an item didn’t sell in the stores it would end up in another stream, whether it’s a waste stream or a resale stream. The outlet model has allowed us to offset the cost of transportation and waste removal.”

Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana also has found success in the area of e-commerce with the ShopGoodwill.com auction site. Items ranging from toys and games to clothing and furniture from various Goodwill stores are available for bid on the site.

Kramer says Goodwill also has found outlets for its book donations through sites such as Amazon and Half.com. He estimates the organization posts between 400 and 500 books a day on those sites. “That’s proven to be a good market for us,” Kramer says.

Kramer credits McClelland with allowing the retail division of Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana room to grow and develop new ideas. “Jim allows us to be very entrepreneurial in spirit and take chances,” Kramer says. “You have to have an entrepreneurial spirit in your organization, and he really supports that type of thinking.”

Not Standing Still
McClelland says Indianapolis Metropolitan High School and the new retail initiatives show that Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana is truly devoted to its mission of helping the less fortunate and area businesses. Originally founded in 1902 by Boston minister the Rev. Edgar J. Helms, Goodwill’s methods have changed in many ways over the years, but its core mission remains true. McClelland says that to remain vital and helpful, the organization must continue to evolve.

“The greatest dangers to any successful company are complacency, inertia, myopia and arrogance,” McClelland says. In contrast, he says, a successful non-profit organization must have high impact in the community, must be financially sustainable and be adaptable to new situations, and Goodwill demonstrates all three.
 
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