Empowering Workers to Navigate the Substantial Economic Changes Ahead,

Hello everybody. uh Derek Gilmer here I am joined by the fantastic team from Goodwill The CEO of Lori Hark and you want to Egan are with me today and I Lori I maybe I'm just gonna start by turning it over to you. I think often times when people think about Goodwill they think about hey I've been stuck in my home for the last 6 months. I cleaned up my garage and I have a lot of cool stuff that I can donate but good will is about a whole lot more than that maybe share with folks. What what what? It is all about right, thanks so much Congressman Gilmer uh so yes, we love your people who donate to us and the people who shop with us uh because we love providing a great products and great value uh but the reason for all of that work The reason for our retail business frankly is so that we can fund free job training programs for the community. Uh most years we serve about 8000 people in our community which cuts across fifteen counties in the state of Washington and we serve. By providing free job training programs, everything from construction skills to IT Skills Financial literacy GED completion um you name it uh anything that a person needs to get started in their career, their first job their second chance job make advancements in their work. Uh we are there to help them and provide those services. Uh we do this both in the Tacoma Pierce County area. We do this in Longview and also in Yakima. Stretch across our region to reach as many people as possible, uh with the pandemic that we are all experiencing right now, Things are a bit different. Uh we cannot meet in person unfortunately, but we have an amazing team that has put together a wonderful virtual learning program called the uh our digital Work Opportunity Center or Goodwill Connect and uh you want that's gonna tell us about that but uh what's wonderful about it is that we are. To meet with our people virtually uh not only providing them digital curriculum, but also providing them the support services that they need one on one. We're talking with them. You know like this on zoom on telephone on text anyway, we can to connect with people and help them through this situation as we all look at bringing coming back to work um helping the economy come back to work helping people uh land jobs and get back on their feet. Our services are more critical than ever, and we're just about to provide those to everyone uh they're made possible by our thrift business. so we do love people shopping and donating because that's what makes our work possible. That's awesome well and and uh you want I always like uh uh a meeting or even a virtual meeting where several times when someone's telling me about their work, they're doing I go WoW and I think I did it about ten times in the half hour that we've just spent with each other. so uh you want you've done an extraordinary job of of building the. Mid flight in terms of providing extra services to people who need it right now and making sure people are getting the training that they need tell folks uh you know what that looks like and and and some of the resources that are available um since a lot of the folks watching maybe um maybe interested in learning more. Thank you Congressman Comer. So uh I just wanna talk about what we've done in the face of Kobi to make sure that we can still connect with those that need um not only workforce. Um, resources and training but also support services resources in the community and also a lot of personal finances. so what we initially did when Cot hit as we shifted everything to our remote platform and across all of our various programs that meant engaging with our community and our clients and participants through um email telephone. um Uh digitally through social media as well as through this uh. Form we've built that enables us to provide training and education through an actual website portal, and that website portals called the digital Work Opportunities Center as Lori just talked about and it's also called goodwill connects and it's because it's about how we're able to connect with the community even though we're all separated and many of us are um still having to stay in our homes and so what's included in that is that we have a landing page that has all kinds of. Around um how do you interview in a virtual environment? How do you set up your resume? It's a whole tool kit of um resources that are self paced to help someone understand how to navigate in this new world of um really trying to educate ourselves and be able to um go into the world and the workforce. In addition to that, we have some very specific trainings. We do our career readiness training, which is all about understanding. To prepare yourself for either um a new job or to go back into the existing industry from which you came, It's all about helping to keep those skills fresh. Um it's also uh about how do you look at all the fundamental skills and employers are looking for. We also have our personal finances aspect of our work, which is really about um providing coaching opportunities around how you can really structure your finances to make them work in a really tough time. We know with Kobe there are many people in our community that hadn't plan on being out of work and now they're having to make their money stretch a lot further and so through our personal finances coaching and courses and education, we're able to help support that and answer those questions and provide resources. We also have several advanced IT opportunities. We also know that in this environment that an industry that is not in decline is our um technology. Uh it is actually um very much to accelerating in a boom stage and so how do we prepare people to go into those kinds of jobs? and so we actually have a fundamentals of IT uh class and uh PC technician certification class that provides the basic skills to be able to go into some of those entry-level positions in the uh technology and IT industry. so that gives you some perspective on what we're offering and that's just the start. We're still in the midst of building this airplane as you had mentioned earlier and there are other courses and opportunities that we're gonna be offering throughout the site and so we're really gonna encourage people just to come and visit us and to see what's available um on that particular site and and we also have the ability to um start tailor services to the person where they are in their life. So if you're a military veteran, we have a team that's focusing on helping military veterans during this time if you're an older worker, we have a team focused on you. We also have a team focused on uh young people. Um, as well as people who are so single parents so uh and certainly people with disabilities, we continue to serve so not only do we have the curriculum online which you want to talk about, but we've also have the support services in terms of the human interaction people who can work one-on-one to really help somebody no matter where they are in their in their life's journey um help them get on to the next step and thank you for that Lori that actually. One more thing, which is a new program for us um and we're very grateful to the Care Act Goodwill also now has a program for rental assistance if anyone is in the threat of being um of losing their housing and that's um both for mortgage and also for rent. Uh we have a program that um we'll be able to work with you and see if we're able to help offset some of those challenges uh so please also reach out to us. That information is on our website as well. We're also doing that. Um through Pierce County and so um if you live in the Pierce County area, please reach out to us as well if there's any challenges with housing that's awesome and I apologies for a special appearance by the Australian Shepherd in the background, we have someone come to the door but uh you know I really am uh both impressed with I'm grateful for the resources that you're providing and and you know I think there's. Appreciation by Democrats and Republicans and everyone in between about the importance of making sure that people have the skills they need to be successful in this economy. That was true before this pandemic. It's particularly true in the face of this pandemic I've introduced a bill called the Skillz Renewal Act, which would help folks who've lost their job as a consequence of covid-nineteen so that they could enroll in apprenticeships or in college classes or retraining programs. So that they can learn a new skill and land new jobs and earn a good living and you know and it's a refundable credit. um that would be available to all workers including lower income workers that don't have a federal income tax liability and that's bipartisan in both the house and the Senate and you're seeing I think an appreciation for uh you know the the chairman of the Fed, said one of the biggest risks through this pandemic is the potential erosion of skills and so the work you're doing is just incredibly. Important so thank you uh uh oriented Yolanda. Thank you for the work you're doing and thanks for the extraordinary job the Goodwill does and uh everybody thanks for watching if uh if you have questions about either the bill I mentioned or the work of goodwill, please don't hesitate to reach out and uh thanks everybody for tuning in. Yeah. Thank you so much and um our website is Goodwill.org if you need to reach us right. Thank you. Congressman Gilmer. Thank you.