Helping people prepare for, find, and keep good jobs is what Goodwill is about.

Hi Everyone – 

Today is the day that we are officially reopening! As of today, all of our stores are reopened, as is our corporate office. The Career Center will be open to the public, preferably by appointment, starting Wednesday. We are excited to be back and it has been a remarkable three months. Every day during that time has brought new information and changes to the environment in which we were operating. We effectively pivoted every step of the way to address those changes as we kept our staff safe throughout. In the past three months we have created an unprecedented amount of policy and procedure (donation handling, wellness checks, call-back procedures, PPE acquisition and disbursement, cleaning checklists, and safe operating procedures, to name a few). In addition, we developed an hour-long safety training that every staff member attended. We have procured the IT resources needed for many to work from home, and built and installed sneeze guards in all of our stores and at our Career Center and corporate location. We have communicated with staff regularly whether they continued to work or had been temporarily laid off through supervisor contacts, these weekly letters, weekly newsletters, the new texting platform, and increased meeting schedules by phone and video. In addition, we helped our community by collecting PPE for two hospital systems, and looked through our stores to collect and donate scrubs to assist our colleagues caring for people with disabilities who have COVID-19. We maintained service to our contract organizations in janitorial and industrial services. We continued to operate GoodTemps and serve those who were still employed. We stayed in contact with our clients, devised new ways to get taxes done, and created new forms and process flow for serving those needing career services. 

So congratulations! We have reached a milestone today. I am so grateful today for all of you, but I want to say a special thank you to all of you who continued to work throughout this time. You stayed focused and committed in the face of an enormous challenge. 

Several other things of note this past week include that our Offender Success Program clients began coming back to work last week. We also participated in the Community Foundation’s Match Day and were successful in assisting to raise nearly $4,000 for Goodwill. And finally, as part of our sustainability efforts we are working with five other Goodwills in Michigan to find an electronics recycling vendor. 

At the same time that we have much to celebrate at Goodwill today, there is much to despair as we look out across our country. 

Over the weekend, another black man was shot twice in the back and killed by a police officer in Atlanta. This is why the protests continue; this is why significant and meaningful change must happen. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar recently said: 

“Yes, protests often are used as an excuse for some to take advantage, just as when fans celebrating a hometown sports team championship burn cars and destroy storefronts. I don’t want to see stores looted or even buildings burn. But African Americans have been living in a burning building for many years, choking on the smoke as the flames burn closer and closer. Racism in America is like dust in the air. It seems invisible – even if you are choking on it – until you let the sun in. Then you see it’s everywhere. As long as we keep shining that light, we have a chance of cleaning it wherever it lands. But we have to stay vigilant, because it’s always still in the air. Police put a gun to my head at 12. Tired of reading about racism? I am tired of living it.” 

This coming Friday is Juneteenth or Freedom Day, a holiday celebrating the end of slavery. It marks the day in 1865 that enslaved people in Texas were told they were free, a full two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation had formally freed them. Making the Emancipation Proclamation a reality did not happen until after the Civil War when the Confederacy was defeated, and Texas was the most remote of the confederate states. Let us all find a way to celebrate the end of slavery this Friday. Nothing is more American than celebrating a day that brought us closer to our founding ideals: that everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

My best – 
Jeanette