strategic-management

CASE 16 • GOODWILL OF SAN FRANCISCO, SAN MATEO AND MARIN COUNTIES — 2009 159
Movement.” In 1916, Helms worked with a Bay Area religious leader, Reverend Samuel
Quickmire. Together they opened the third Goodwill in the nation, Goodwill of San
Francisco, to help local citizens who were still recovering from the 1906 earthquake. Over
the next 20 years, Goodwill opened seven more operations in Northern California.
Deborah Alvarez-Rodriguez joined Goodwill in 2004 when she inherited an organization
that was struggling operationally and financially. Prior to this she had been the
director of San Francisco City and County’s Department of Children, Youth and their
Families. In 2008, the San Francisco Business Times named her the Most Admired
Nonprofit CEO. In 2009, she was named one of the Bay Area’s most influential women in
business for the fourth year in a row.
Immediately after her appointment, Alvarez-Rodriguez began a planning process in
collaboration with the Goodwill board of directors and a newly developed internal, crossfunctional
Change Management Team. The intensive process began with a revision of
Goodwill’s mission and vision. This interdisciplinary team, which involved staff from all
levels of the organization, not only reviewed the organization’s mission, goals, and values;
it also researched the external forces (social, governmental, and economic) that challenge
Goodwill’s ability to offer successful programs for the population it was designed to serve.
Their work resulted in the following new Vision and Mission statements, which were
unanimously adopted by the Board of Directors in 2006:
Vision: Our Goodwill envisions a world free of poverty where people have the power to
support themselves and their families, live in safe and thriving communities, and
actively care for the environment.
Mission: We create solutions to poverty through the businesses we operate.
To implement this new mission, Alvarez-Rodriguez, the management team, and the
board of directors committed to change the way it operated—integrating job training and
service providing into the core of its revenue-generating business model. Alvarez-
Rodriguez worked to eliminate what she calls “silos within silos” that had developed
within the organization and prevented it from infusing its primary mission—helping poor
and disadvantaged people attain skills and find work—in all departments. In a 2007 interview
in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Alvarez-Rodriguez stated, “There was a split
between the mission side and the retail side. We needed to put the organization in a position
where it could thrive.” The Change Management Team worked to create a transformational
model that would embed training and professional development into all of the
revenue-generating departments of the organization. In addition, this transformational
model required social services programs to be self-sustaining, keeping a keen focus on
their “profitability.” By the end of the planning process, Alvarez-Rodriguez put the organization
on a path of reflection, development, and change that was comparable to the work
that Goodwill expected of its participants.
Operations
Based on its new mission, in November 2006 Goodwill’s board of directors adopted a new
strategy of workforce creation through an environmental value recovery business platform.
The board adopted the following three-part definition of workforce creation:
• We operate businesses that recruit and employ people who are overcoming barriers
to employment, we provide them with training, experience and support so they can
achieve long-term sustainable employment and the capacity to advance in careers.
• We form strategic partnerships by partnering to invest in and strengthen the
economic infrastructure of neighborhoods with special emphasis on employing
and developing people who are overcoming some of the greatest barriers to
employment.
• We support neighborhood businesses that are owned or co-owned by our participants
and others overcoming barriers to employment.
Goodwill of San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin Counties, Inc. has almost 500
employees, and operates 17 retail stores in the three counties. To support the retail