How Goodwill Industries Made Me a Conservative

I worked at two Goodwill corporate offices a while back, one as the job training department head, and at the other in development - that's fundraising. Goodwill was not my first job in nonprofit work, but it was completely different from all the others I ever worked at. And after Goodwill, I was hooked.

There are several missions that nonprofits carry out. The most common one today is the 527, a lobbying nonprofit that primarily promotes a specific political agenda. Others include straight charity, where needy people are given goods, money, or other assistance to help them make ends meet right now; many churches engage in this kind of nonprofit activity through clothes closets or soup kitchens.

And then there are charities that exist primarily to teach the poor how to best make use of government services.

But Goodwill (and to a lesser degree, the Salvation Army) has a completely different mission. Their goal is to teach great job skills to people who for some reason don't have them. It could be through generations of welfare dependence; or through a disability that has destroyed their ability to make a living in other ways; or it could just be simply bad work habits.

Through a combination of training programs, job coaching, and placement services, Goodwill helps people find and keep decent jobs. That's it - their whole mission

What Does This Have To Do With Conservatism?

When I first started working at Goodwill, I was a liberal - not quite a flaming liberal, but boy I sure was angry about a lot of stuff. I felt I'd gotten a raw deal; my college degree (English) was next to useless in the real world, I was a single mom and having trouble making ends meet, I was riding the bus and struggling to get my children from place to place. My life sucked, and it was everyone else's fault -- my parents', my children's father, the people who let me take English in college, or just the world in general.

Somewhere along the line, I'd gotten the idea that the world owed me.