Disability History & Awareness Month: Goodwill Industries is founded in 1902
Office of the Governor Texas sent this bulletin at 10/10/2012 08:30 AM CDTCommittee on People with Disabilities
Disability History & Awareness Month: Goodwill Industries is founded in 1902
Goodwill Industries was founded in 1902 by Rev. Edgar James Helms, a Methodist minister in Boston, who was seeking ways to help residents in the city’s impoverished South End. Helms collected used household goods and clothing in wealthier areas of the city, and then trained and hired people who were poor and immigrants to repair the used goods. The donations were then resold, or were given to the people who repaired them. The system worked, and the Goodwill philosophy of “a hand up, not a hand out” was born. The organization was formally incorporated in 1910. Known at the time as Morgan Memorial Cooperative Industries and Stores, Inc. (a reflection of its headquarters in Boston’s Morgan Memorial Chapel), it provided job skills training programs, and even a rudimentary placement service. The name Goodwill Industries was later adopted after a Brooklyn, NY workshop coined the phrase.
During the challenges of the Great Depression, Goodwill narrowed the focus of its services, from serving unemployed people generally, to a more manageable sector of the population that had long been neglected: America’s citizens with disabilities. Since then, Goodwill’s mission has grown into an international movement, improving the quality of life for people with disabilities everywhere. Today, Goodwill Industries has 208 autonomous member organizations in the U.S. and Canada, and 22 other countries. (175 of them are in the United States and Canada.) Today Goodwill has become a $4 billion non-profit organization.
From:
“Goodwill’s Founder Edgar Helms,” available at:
http://www.goodwillnne.org/about/goodwills-founder-edgar-helms/
October is Persons with Disabilities History and Awareness Month in Texas. Each workday in October 2012, the Governor’s Committee on People with Disabilities will post a daily Disability History Fact highlighting the accomplishments of people with disabilities or important dates and events related to the history of people with disabilities. These daily history facts will be presented to celebrate “Persons with Disabilities History and Awareness Month” in Texas. Learn more about disability history: http://governor.state.tx.us/disabilities/resources/disability_history/
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