Goodwill Easter Seals
53
5
"Up" is the number of experts who agree that the nonprofit has had the most impact in the
field. "Down" is the number of experts who disagree that the nonprofit has had the most impact in field.
The Charities Review Council is an independent resource for people who make contributions to support charities. When an organization meets all 27 of their Accountability Standards, they earn the Meets Standards seal. Goodwill Easter Seals has also received the CRC seal and you can read more about their CRC recognition here: http://www.smartgivers.org/Report/Report.aspx?EIN=410706171.
Headquarters Location: St. Paul, MN
Founded: 1919
Mission: The mission of Goodwill/Easter Seals is to assist people with barriers to education, employment and independence in achieving their goals. We prepare people for work.
Tags:
employment training, transitional employment, disabilities, homelessness, workforce re-entry, immigrants, low-income, dislocated workers, social enterprise, advocacy, minnesota, 2011
Summary
Stories
Expert Reviews
Leadership
From the Nonprofit
Leadership
Michael Wirth-Davis.
Michael Wirth-Davis serves as Chief Executive Officer and President of Goodwill Industries, Inc. Mr. Wirth-Davis has been with Goodwill Industries since 1990. He served as Director Of Vocational Services For Courage Center, Golden Valley, Mn from 1985 to 1990; Director Of Adult Day Services For Ray Graham Association, Elmhurst, Il from 1979 to 1985. He serves as a Director of…
See full bio.
Transparency Information
This organization has earned the GuideStar Exchange Seal, demonstrating its commitment to transparency
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Financial Data
Overhead Ratio:
16.37%
Total Revenue:
$27,086,959
From the Nonprofit
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Contact Info
Website:
E-Mail:
mwirth-davis AT goodwilleasterseals.org
Phone:
(651) 379.5800
Facebook:
Address:
553 Fairview Ave N
St. Paul, MN 55104, USA
Twitter:
Story:
Ron worked as a printer for 11 years but lost his job due to the recession. For several months, he collected unemployment insurance and worked temporary labor jobs to support his wife and two daughters. On the recommendation of a friend, Ron applied to the Construction Skills Training Program at Goodwill/Easter Seals, where he thrived. Thanks to his positive attitude and enthusiasm for learning, upon graduating, Ron was quickly hired by Urban Homeworks. Gradually, Ron’s responsibilities have increased, and today his duties include leading a home renovation crew, managing all properties, maintaining all vehicles and preparing volunteer sites. Additionally, he is training to become a Lead Abatement Supervisor. Ron often returns to Goodwill/Easter Seals to share his experiences with other men and women who are hoping to make a better life for themselves and their families.
Expert Reviews of Goodwill Easter Seals
Evidence of Impact Summary:
Goodwill offers industry-specific training, transitional jobs, counseling, and placement that enable individuals with significant barriers to employment to successfully enter the workforce. This well-established organization also engages in advocacy, innovative partnerships with educational institutions, and low-cost retail.See expert comments.
Organization Strengths Summary:
Experts praised Goodwill for its outstanding program model, dedicated leadership and staff, and flexible adaptation to changing market demands. The organization has a positive local reputation and strong community connections. Many experts noted that Goodwill's internal revenue source gives it the freedom to focus on providing innovative and quality services.See expert comments.
Areas for Improvement Summary:
Experts gave a variety of suggestions for improvement, including offering more flexible training schedules, collaborating with similar organizations, focusing more deeply on fewer areas, and aligning Goodwill's reputation with the broad range of services it offers.See expert comments.
Expert Comments: Evidence of Impact
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Innovative educational partnerships for long-term impact |
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Innovative partnering strategies with adult basic education, higher education, and workforce development make G/ES very impactful in the services they deliver. They are learning how to connect rather than duplicate services, which gives a client the ability to continue using community resources even when done with the G/ES service. | ||
Effectively serves clients with significant barriers to employment |
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They help a large number of clients who are entering the workforce for the first time or after a time of significant transition. | ||
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G/ES offers strong programming with ex-offenders and persons with disabilities. | ||
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This organization has trained and placed over 1,000 hard-to-place clients in a difficult economy. | ||
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They have innovative efforts for low-income folks. | ||
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G/ES has had success in assisting individuals with significant barriers to employment secure competitive employment. | ||
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This organization has a track record of success working with and training people with disabilities. | ||
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Goodwill has a very large continuum of workforce development services that affords them the ability to provide high quality short-term customized training (in a variety of areas that are highly useful for persons with the most barriers to employment), strong case management services, and impactful collaborations like the Father Project that address multiple barriers to employment and stability. They lead in providing employment services to persons with disabilities. Goodwill is well-situated in the metropolitan area and greater Minnesota to provide services where they are most needed and impactful with the participants they serve, and the organization clearly aligns their mission and programming efforts well. | ||
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This organization serves a population of individuals who may not otherwise have the opportunity for specialized training leading to employment. | ||
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This organization serves both individuals with disabilities and individuals in poverty. Their ability to generate income through their business enterprises puts them in a unique position to be more proactive than other similar agencies. | ||
High-quality skills training and job placement services |
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They offer a quality hard-skills training program for specific sectors. | ||
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They offer comprehensive training and placement services. | ||
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Their automotive training program is successful in training and placing entry-level people into this field. | ||
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G/ES has employment training programs such as bank reconciliation or auto mechanic technician that lead directly to employment. | ||
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Goodwill has the tradition, history, and acumen to perform in the area of workforce development. Their expertise is rooted in diverse sets of workforce development programs and services; as new businesses enter into the market, Goodwill has adjusted its services and program offerings to meet the new demands. | ||
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They offer strong training programs with close business partners. | ||
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This organization has been around for years and has established itself through various workforce training programs. They have been very successful with training programs in the past, which is shown through their placements. | ||
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G/ES has a diverse, industry-specific skills training program. | ||
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G/ES provides industry-specific training and transitional work opportunities. Those are great tools to transition people into self-sufficiency and productivity. | ||
Transitional work environments and low-cost retail for communities |
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Goodwill uses evidence-based practice and research methods to evaluate their programs. They serve a broad population from dislocated workers to the disabled to ex-offenders, difficult populations that many organizations shy away from. Their environment is highly professional and is an excellent environment for special populations to benefit from realistic work environments. | ||
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They have a broad-based impact in our community with their development of work-readiness sites, and will work in the libraries with the job seeker as well. | ||
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This non-profit has reached out to the immigrant community to help individuals learn job skills and gain employment experience while also providing a service to our communities: low cost retail. | ||
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Goodwill has reached out to new and different partners to deepen their impact in communities. The use of their retail operations is helping meet the needs of very hard to serve populations. They also are helping advance stronger workforce policy. | ||
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Goodwill provides jobs, services for low-income people, and volunteer opportunities. | ||
Broad range of employment services |
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G/ES has forward thinking management, a range of programming, advocacy and public policy making, and deep financial pockets to try innovative things. | ||
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This is a long-standing organization working with difficult populations. They offer refer for employment and have employment on site. They focus on prisoner re-entry, and have an interesting transition philosophy. They primarily support employment, but have been recently branching out into other areas. They have a longstanding reputation for success. | ||
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This is a well-known non-profit providing a variety of services. | ||
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In all, G/ES placed over 1,000 people into employment last year. That's a tremendous feat. It offers a range of employment programs from transitional jobs to vocational training to specialized employment counseling. It is also accessible to walk-in clients because it has substantial private resources to pay for services to individuals who are not connected to public funding streams. | ||
Provides valuable transitional work environments |
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They offer hands-on work experience. | ||
Expert Comments: Organization Strengths
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Dedicated leadership and staff |
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Their leadership is creative and forward-thinking. | ||
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Their staff is involved in the workforce development issues of the region. | ||
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Their strengths are leadership and staff. | ||
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Their training staff is strong. | ||
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Their strengths include the leadership and staff's dedication to making impacts in our residents' lives. | ||
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G/ES's main strength is its staff. | ||
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This organization employs a highly competent and dedicated staff at all levels of the agency and areas of service. They have strong leadership and are highly powerful advocates in local political arenas. In rural MN, they are sometimes the only workforce development resource for local residents and appear to be leading the charge in several issue areas in these communities. | ||
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This large non-profit has excellent leadership. | ||
Internal revenue stream |
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One of Goodwill's strengths is their non-governmental funding stream. | ||
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They are able to expand programming in a time of budget constraints. | ||
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Because of their size and the revenue from their stores, they don't fall into the trap of chasing dollars and are not forced to make decisions solely on funding whims. In addition, they participate and help support policy change and advocacy that supports their direct service efforts. | ||
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80% of their funding comes from the stores; what a gift for any organization to be able to have such stable funding that allows them to add service and try new things. They are also very collaborative, with good managers. | ||
Flexible adaptation to market demands |
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G/ES's strengths include leadership, staff, operations and nimble oversight to add career training and placement in high demand fields. | ||
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G/ES is a leader in the vocational rehabilitation community; they have responded to changing demographics of the metropolitan area-developed services to meet the needs of immigrant populations. | ||
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Their training includes entry-level as well as trade skills for jobs. | ||
Strong community connections |
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Goodwill's strengths include their willingness to locate staff and services in community locations and their ability to respond to industry needs and training for employment training and placement. | ||
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Their leadership, especially the CEO, ministers to the community through their work, personal activities, and by teaching (seminars, university classes, workshops, etc.), and networking with other organizations. | ||
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G/ES's proximity to their customer base is strong. They have good outreach and are willing to work with other partners for referrals, etc. | ||
Local reputation and national resources |
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G/ES's strengths include history, reputation, and collaboration. | ||
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The strengths of Goodwill/Easter Seals rest solidly in its name recognition and national operations. | ||
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Their strengths include diversity of revenue, ability to link to national resources, and community awareness of the Goodwill brand. | ||
Outstanding program model and operations |
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Goodwill's strengths include their ability to effectively train and employ people with different levels of disabilities, their effective strategies for success of participants, and their strong leadership and stability. | ||
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This nonprofit is very organized and has a systematic approach to their model of workforce development, which has added to their success. | ||
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I think because it has been around for so long, its organizational structure is excellent. They have partnerships with companies to provide employment for graduates of their program. | ||
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G/ES offers holistic services to many of its participants. These include mental health counseling, parenting support, basic needs assistance and so on. The organization is also extremely well-connected in the public funding world. It seems to be involved in every government workforce program out there. | ||
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One of their strengths is finances: 85% of every dollar goes directly toward their mission to help people in Minnesota train for and find employment. | ||
Excellent partner |
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Their strengths include their ability to partner, strong leadership, and diverse revenue sources. | ||
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Good leadership, ability to partner well, marketing, finances | ||
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Their strengths include leadership, evaluation, and creating community partnerships. | ||
Expert Comments: Areas for Improvement
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Foundation Professionals (F)
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Researchers and Faculty (R)
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Nonprofit Senior Staff (N)
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Other (consultants, journalists, policy makers) (O)
Consider the children of clients |
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They could think more about the children of the people they serve. | ||
Increase post-correctional access |
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There could be more access for those reentering from correctional institutions. | ||
Align brand reputation with actual services |
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Goodwill Easter Seals is well known for providing services to those who are disabled; while this certainly may be a segment of its target audience, it is not the only population that G/ES serves. The organization could use a more robust national re-branding campaign to bring the organization's image more into an alignment with the diverse populations it serves, as well as to show how much the organization (nationally and locally) has evolved. Additionally, G/ES has to do more to recruit and employee people of color in positions of leadership within the organization. | ||
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Their retail operations have higher visibility than their job training. Should this be the other way around? | ||
More flexible training options |
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They could work on offering more online training . | ||
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My clients are unable to participate in most of their programs because those who are not receiving public assistance cannot afford to lose work hours and participate in a full-time, 6 week training course.. | ||
Partner more with similar organizations |
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They could improve their collaborations. | ||
Heighten retail experience |
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Their stores aren't always as clean and organized as they could be. | ||
Update training programs |
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Goodwill could improve on integrating their programming to provide a broader continuum of services or "stacking" of participant skills and experience: for example, aligning their training programs with case-management focused programs, and utilizing their broad retail operations as spaces for paid training grounds for persons involved in other areas of the agency's programming. Although not always the case, I feel the organization could similarly benefit from being more open to formally collaborating with organizations doing similarly-aligned work in the area. | ||
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Some of G/ES's vocational training programs seem "tired". They have been operating the same way for a long time and need to re-engage their business/employer partners in an effort to update their training curricula and overall program design. | ||
Focus deeply on a few areas |
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They need to narrow their vision - they sometimes try to do it all. They have recently become a part of the workforce development arena, when the arena is already too full. | ||
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Goodwill could focus more on those areas in which they are uniquely positioned to enter deeply, and avoid the temptation of too much programming diversity. They could also partner with other community providers so that the overall community capacity is also built to provide ongoing support and resources to clients served by Goodwill. | ||
Leadership
Michael Wirth-Davis
President and Chief Executive Officer
President and Chief Executive Officer
From the Nonprofit
The nonprofit has not added any comments yet. If you are a representative of this nonprofit and would like to leave a comment, please email us at
feedback@myphilanthropedia.org
with your request.
