NEWS
Jobs for Our Community Campaign a Success
October 1, 2009
Earlier this year, Goodwill realized that our community faced the most severe economy since the Great Depression. Tens of thousands of people in the Bay Area alone had lost their jobs as a result of the economic crisis. People who faced severe barriers to employment – including disabilities, past addiction, past incarceration and lack of experience – were having an even tougher time finding jobs. These are the people Goodwill serves. Without Goodwill’s help, they were at risk of falling back into poverty.
In January 2009, we set out to raise one million dollars so that we could provide for a basic human need: the right and ability to work. We made a commitment to serve everyone who needed our help in looking for and preparing for work. That meant not turning away a single person who needed our help. Whoever came through our doors was going to get job-placement counseling and support. They all got it. No one we could serve was turned away. Not one.
When we kicked off this fundraising campaign in January, we were already experiencing a 25 percent increase in demand for our services. By June 2009, we were seeing a 2,000 percent – yes, a two-thousand percent -- increase in demand for these services.
To provide services to anybody who needed it, we turned to you, our community, for help and support. Several local foundations generously came through with discretionary grants to lift the campaign off the ground. They include The San Francisco Foundation, the Evelyn & Walter Haas Fund, the Hewlett Foundation, the S.H. Cowell Foundation, the Hearst Foundations, The Bernard Osher Foundation and the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund. We are particularly thankful for the support of Phil Schlein, who not only made a generous gift himself, but also facilitated the grants made by the Goldman and Osher foundations. We also received an especially generous lead gift of $100,000 from Kat Taylor and Tom Steyer who contributed because they were concerned about the local job market and the struggles of ordinary people in our community to find work. In addition to these large gifts, we received hundreds of smaller contributions from people who believe in Goodwill and wanted to see us succeed in this effort.
We want to share the results to date. Thanks to the support of everyone who participated in the Jobs for Our Community Campaign, we raised more than $700,000 in gifts and pledges. While we fell short of our $1 million target, we achieved the most important goal of our campaign: serving our community and creating a local solution to a global crisis.
You made this possible. Working together, we helped 4,120 people get the job support they needed during the worst economy in the past 80 years. Because you came together as a caring community, you also provided us with the support and capacity to respond quickly to the economic crisis, to expand services rather than cut them, and to leverage government funds that will, in turn, allow us to expand the basic job-related services that will be needed long after this recession is officially declared over.
Thank you for everything you have done to take care of our community.
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