TheBuzz
TheBuzz
New nonprofit partnership
will stretch donation dollarsGoodwill Industries of Hawaii and Big Brothers Big Sisters Foundation Inc. have formed a partnership to stretch donations from the public.
Donations of material goods solicited and collected by Big Brothers will be sold to Goodwill for resale in its retail thrift stores. In addition, Goodwill will refer requests for household collection to Big Brothers.
It sounds almost too simple.
Both organizations face significantly increased demand for services and feel the concomitant weight of increased need for revenue to fund programs and operations.
"We're serving double the amount of people that we did the previous year," said Laura Robertson, president and chief executive officer of Goodwill Industries of Hawaii.
"A lot of that is attributed to Sept. 11, people just needing help getting back to work," she said. "Our agency funds programs through our retail stores. Donations are critical to us from the public, having enough merchandise in the stores to sell. We were looking for a way to increase the donation level and increase sales to provide more services."
Goodwill's programs served 2,200 people in 2001 and 4,500 in 2002, most of them with employment training and placement help.
Big Brothers Big Sisters, meanwhile, was also looking at ways to grow to meet a goal to serve 1 million children nationally by the year 2010.
For Hawaii that would boost the 557 children served in 2002 to 1,500. That will require more case managers and volunteers to serve youths on the waiting list and those who will seek services in the future.
"It's an ambitious expansion," said Dennis Brown, president and chief executive officer of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Honolulu Inc. He is also the new chief executive officer of the foundation that entered into the partnership with Goodwill. The foundation is the fund-raising arm of Big Brothers Big Sisters.
In recent years that foundation has grown its solicitation and collection operations for its previous arrangement with Savers, a for-profit retail thrift store with two locations on Oahu and one on Maui. The agreement capped the amount Big Brothers could sell to Savers but there is no ceiling in the Goodwill contract.
Robertson and Brown know each other through their long involvement in nonprofit circles and discussed a possible partnership once before, but the timing wasn't right. When they revisited the issue last year "we definitely said we were interested," Robertson said. Both organizations' boards of directors worked over the next six months to forge the partnership and craft a two-year renewable contract.
The contract is "exclusive to the extent that we have given Goodwill the right of first refusal," Brown said. "If we bring in more than they can take, they let us know. If they refuse we have the right to go and find someone else who wants to buy it."
The partnership relieves Goodwill of the burden of collection from homes but it still welcomes donations to its drop boxes and at its thrift store locations.
The Maui Big Brothers organization maintains its contract with Savers on the Valley Isle and is not part of the Oahu contract with Goodwill.
Savers will not be hurt by Big Brothers' new alliance, according to District Manager Phil Carey. "There's plenty of merchandise to go around for everybody," he said.
Savers' primary supplier is the United Cerebral Palsy Association of Hawaii Foundation and it has recently signed a similar contract with the National Kidney Foundation.
Savers has some 200 stores and merchandise contracts with 80 different nonprofits throughout the mainland, Canada and Australia, Carey said. What doesn't sell at Savers is bundled into 1,000-pound bales and sold to "rag buyers" for shipment to third-world countries, Carey said. Savers also donates merchandise to the Institute for Human Services and school drama programs, and provides discounts to nonprofits helping people transition back into the work force.
Commercials indicating that a single donation can help both organizations hit the airwaves earlier this week.
Erika Engle is a reporter with the Star-Bulletin.
Call 529-4302, fax 529-4750 or write to Erika Engle,
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., No. 7-210,
Honolulu, HI 96813. She can also be reached
at: eengle@starbulletin.com