How Goodwill Industries Made Me a Conservative

I worked at two Goodwill corporate offices a while back, one as the job training department head, and at the other in development - that's fundraising. Goodwill was not my first job in nonprofit work, but it was completely different from all the others I ever worked at. And after Goodwill, I was hooked.

There are several missions that nonprofits carry out. The most common one today is the 527, a lobbying nonprofit that primarily promotes a specific political agenda. Others include straight charity, where needy people are given goods, money, or other assistance to help them make ends meet right now; many churches engage in this kind of nonprofit activity through clothes closets or soup kitchens.

And then there are charities that exist primarily to teach the poor how to best make use of government services.

But Goodwill (and to a lesser degree, the Salvation Army) has a completely different mission. Their goal is to teach great job skills to people who for some reason don't have them. It could be through generations of welfare dependence; or through a disability that has destroyed their ability to make a living in other ways; or it could just be simply bad work habits.

Through a combination of training programs, job coaching, and placement services, Goodwill helps people find and keep decent jobs. That's it - their whole mission

What Does This Have To Do With Conservatism?

When I first started working at Goodwill, I was a liberal - not quite a flaming liberal, but boy I sure was angry about a lot of stuff. I felt I'd gotten a raw deal; my college degree (English) was next to useless in the real world, I was a single mom and having trouble making ends meet, I was riding the bus and struggling to get my children from place to place. My life sucked, and it was everyone else's fault -- my parents', my children's father, the people who let me take English in college, or just the world in general.

Somewhere along the line, I'd gotten the idea that the world owed me.

This was a particularly stupid thing for me; I didn't even realize I was thinking that way. When my children talked about things being unfair, I'd ask for the paper they had that said things always needed to be fair. I was always lecturing them that they needed to take care of themselves because the world wouldn't do it for them.

Yet here I was, mad because the world had given me a raw deal, because I had trouble finding good daycare, buying a car, even getting a license.

Then I came to Goodwill. I worked in development - that is, fundraising - and had much more fun than I ever thought I would. Except when I fielded one particular type of call. This was the guy who called and gave me the sob story about his house burning down, or his children being hungry, or just needing a little extra help, and could our stores please maybe give him some of that furniture other people gave us?

The first time - and only the first time - I brought the issue to my boss. He looked at me as if I were nuts. The furniture, he explained, was the way Goodwill made money. The money Goodwill made was not profit, contrary to what so many seemed to think. Then he told me to read up on the beginning of Goodwill.

Its founder was a minister in a poor neighborhood, and frustrated at the large numbers of able-bodied young men who were unable to find work, and instead hung out on street corners. There were no jobs to be had, particularly for poor immigrant men. So he made jobs. He went around to houses, begging for their junk and old clothes. He took all these back to his church, then hired the jobless men to come in and repair them. He sold the refurbished goods, and used the money to hire more workers.

Pretty soon, he had an industry. Young men were developing job skills by working for him, and he was giving them work experience. As newly-skilled employees were hired away, he'd hire more.

The scheme is the ultimate teach-a-man-to-fish pattern, except they're also teaching him how to like fishing, and sometimes with lifeskills classes how to cook and eat the fish later.

This is what Goodwill does: they collect unwanted junk, hire people to sort it and label it, and hire other people to sell it in the stores. The profits are plowed into new stores, or into other employment programs designed to bring people in off the streets and help them learn job skills, then go out and get jobs.

I didn't know it, but I was converted. The world is really all about taking care of yourself; no one else is put here to do it for you. If you do your job, and don't get in the way of anyone around you doing theirs, the system we have in America works.

Around that core, my conservatism grew. All the values I learned as a child from my contractor father and working mother, from my grandparents and self-made relatives, were encapsulated in the work ethic at the core of Goodwill. And with good work ethic, with learning not to feel sorry for yourself and instead to take responsibility for yourself, good citizens are grown.

You don't have to save the world to save the world. If you take care of yourself and teach your children to do the same, you'll make a difference. And if you allow yourself to shine, you can be a beacon to others who want to have the same life. The message really is simply respecting yourself and looking at what you can do, not what you can't do. Worrying about taking care of yourself, and teaching others to take care of themselves on the way.

That self-reliance, belief in the strength and value of the individual, is at the core of conservatism. It is also at the core of me. How could I have become anything else?