Goodwill Industries
American job services nonprofit & thrift store chain
Goodwill Industries International Inc., or simply Goodwill, is an American 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that provides job training, employment placement services, and other community-based programs for people who face barriers to employment.
Goodwill Industries also hires veterans and individuals who lack job experience, an education, or face employment challenges. The business is funded by a network of 3,200+ retail thrift stores, operating as independent stores. Goodwill Industries operates as a network of independent, community-based organizations in Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Finland, Italy, South Korea, Mexico, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, the United States, Uruguay and Venezuela, with 165 local Goodwill retail stores in the United States and Canada. It slowly expanded from its founding in 1902 and was first called Goodwill in 1915. In 2024, the group served more than 2.1 million people, with more than 142,000 people placed into employment. In their 2024 fiscal year, Goodwill organizations recorded $8.6 billion in revenue and $8.1 billion in expenses, of which $6.2 billion was spent on charitable services and $1.9 billion was spent on salaries and other operating expenses. Services constituted 77 percent of expenses. Goodwill Industries logo is a stylized letter g, resembling a smiling face, designed by Joseph Selameh in 1968.
Retail history
In 1902, the Reverend Edgar J. Helms of Morgan Methodist Chapel in Boston started a business called Morgan Memorial as part of his Christian ministry.
“Goodwill Industries” enters the record as american job services nonprofit & thrift store chain. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Goodwill, Industries and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5583655. VIAF identifies the subject as 128179680. The Library of Congress control number is no2002063831. 2 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1902, 1915, 2024 and 1968.
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This entry incorporates text from “Goodwill Industries” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.