Thank you, mimi, for your story. Their insistence on an on-line application sounds a little fishy to me. What I am coming to suspect is that their agenda can have a lot of ripples in it that you and I are not in a position to grasp. Jeffro, who posted above about their concern for maximizing their funding, may have been closest to the heart of the problem.

The reading I have been doing about Goodwill Industries suggests something disturbing. Having massive experience as "an organization that helps those w/ disabilities" has led to Goodwill becoming, in the opinion of some investigators, very adept at exploiting people with disabilities. Some observers feel that Goodwill does more than just about any American organization to exploit cheap labor. This is a multi-billion dollar organization that provides extremely lucrative careers for the people who run it. They receive millions of dollars in funding from the U.S. government. Seeking to control outcomes for their programs to optimize that funding is a science with them. You just can't help people whose lives have precarious features without taking some risks. When protecting your funding takes on pre-eminent importance, then an organization becomes just like a for-profit business in that protecting the bottom line can push out more "charitable" motives.

Of course, a charity has to survive to do any good. But the cold, calculating, even ruthlesss way they described their intent on not allowing under-performing program participants to jeopardize their funding stuck me as kind of creepy when I heard it.

Thank you, mimi, for your belief that something will come along for me. Thank you for sharing your hopefulness with me. Like you, I think I could have been an asset in the work setting where Goodwill could have placed me. The sponsorship of an organization willing to believe in my potential for recovery could have been life changing for me. Goodwill Industries pays a lot of lip-service in their web sites and literature to being that kind of an organization. In person, Goodwill staff have not communicated that spirit to me.