Edgar J. Helms

Founded Goodwill Industries in 1902 to help people with disabilities and disadvantages participate fully in society by expanding their occupational capabilities. To accomplish this mission, Helms created an innovative system whereby Goodwill collects used items from the community and sells them in Goodwill stores to fund its employment, training and job placement programs.

"Friends of Goodwill, be dissatisfied with your work until every handicapped and unfortunate person in your community has an opportunity to develop to his fullest usefulness and enjoy a maximum of abundant living."

— Edgar J. Helms

Born: January 19, 1863 Malone, New York
Died: December 23, 1942 Boston, Massachusetts

Goodwill Industries is about working people. From modest beginnings in Boston, it has grown to be one of the world's largest nonprofit providers of employment and training services for people with disabilities and other disadvantaging conditions such as welfare dependency, illiteracy, criminal history and homelessness.

The concept of Goodwill began in 1902 when Methodist minister Edgar J. Helms developed a plan to provide employment and job training for poor immigrants in the Boston area. Helms put down-and-out men and women to work restoring unwanted garments and other articles, giving them the opportunity to learn trades, skills, and modest wages as they worked. This cycle of donations, processing, resale and wages was the beginning of Goodwill Industries and has remained essentially intact through the years. Dr. Helms' vision set an early course for what is now a $2.4 billion dollar nonprofit organization. Today, Goodwill Industries International is the world's largest private-sector employer of people with disabilities and disadvantaged conditions.

Edgar James Helms was born on January 19, 1863 in a lumber camp near the wilderness town of Malone, New York, just south of the Canadian border. His father, William Helms, was logging crew superintendent and his mother, Lerona, was camp cook. In 1865, taking advantage of the 1862 Homestead Act, the family moved to Nashua, Iowa. In 1878, at age fifteen, Edgar Helms became a printer's apprentice at the Beacon, the local newspaper, thus beginning what he hoped would be a journalistic career. Helms reluctantly left the Beacon three years later to attend Cornell College, a staunchly Methodist institution in Mount Vernon, Iowa.

Because of his limited funds, Helms worked numerous hours in addition to his studies, making college life difficult. Helms left college in the spring term and within six months embarked again on a newspaper career. Over the next four years Helms and his partner Edward Blackert published two newspapers. Before he was twenty-one, Helms' strong temperance editorials led to his selection as chairman of the Clay County delegation to the state Republican convention where a Prohibition plank was adopted.

He then led a successful county campaign to unseat "a rum candidate for legislature." Although Helms was unsuccessful in his own bid in public office, his experiences ultimately led him back to Cornell and into a life as a minister and a missionary. He sold both his newspapers and used these funds to support his final year in Cornell and later at the Boston University Theological School.

In 1892, Helms married his longtime fiancée Jean Preston, who had joined him in Boston at the Theological School for deaconess training. The two began devoting much of their time providing missionary support to the immigrant population in the North End of Boston. Although they had dreamed of moving to India to continue their missionary work, the Methodist Church had a proscription against sending married missionaries abroad at the time. Thus, at the age of thirty-two, Helms was offered the ministry post at Morgan Chapel, in Boston's South End. Here, at a dilapidated inner city mission is where Helms vision of Goodwill began.

From the outset of his work at Morgan, Helms was focused on using the church to meet obvious community needs. Under Helms' supervision, the Chapel provided solutions for bathing and laundry services, created a children's center, a nursery, kindergarten, and led the effort against local prostitution and underworld elements in its parish. In the fall of 1896, Helms added an industrial school and night school, and in 1897 added a music school. In 1899, his wife Jean, after tending to others with tuberculosis, contracted the disease herself and died later that year. At about the same time, Helms learned that the city was preparing to condemn the Morgan Chapel building as unsafe and having it torn down by the spring of 1900.

Helms moved his staff and missionary operations to other nearby facilities until he could secure a mortgage for a new facility, Morgan Memorial. The great financial collapse of 1902-1903 created widespread unemployment. The already poor population of the area became more destitute and many of the middle class came periously close to poverty. For a time, Helms was able to support these people by seeking donations from the more affluent sections of Boston, however this method of fundraising was not sustainable.

In 1902, Helms took a burlap sack to these same sections of Boston and asked for cast-off shoes, clothing, and virtually anything he could carry away. He put men and women of the South End to work repairing the collected items, which were then sold for modest amounts. Helms noted that the poor retained a large measure of their self-respect and dignity if they were required to pay even a token amount for whatever was offered them. This approach became the Goodwill store concept.

By 1905, the relief work, now bringing collected goods by horse-drawn wagon, had grown to such a volume that Helms incorporated these efforts into an organization known as the Morgan Memorial Cooperative Industries and Stores, Inc. These stores were run as a nonprofit, charitable corporation. The corporation operated not only in his church building but also expanded into several adjacent houses.

In 1907 Helms formed the Morgan Memorial School of Applied Christianity which taught courses and forums for youth and adult education. Ten years later this school would be absorbed by the Deaconess Training School, which was merged with Boston University in 1917 to become the University's School of Religious Education and Social Work.

By 1910, however, Morgan Memorial Cooperative Industries, now formally incorporated, was faced with financial disaster when it couldn't pay the mortgage note and the bank sought to foreclose. When the bank attempted to auction the property, Helms rallied other churches and institutions to assist in his fund-raising efforts, and was able to retain the buildings and property. He then applied for, and received, a charter from the state of Massachusetts to form the National Cooperative Industrial Relief Association to promote the concepts developed at Morgan Memorial which could be used for other similar efforts throughout the United States. The name Goodwill Industries was later adopted after a Brooklyn, NY workshop coined the phrase.

With Helms as the driving force, Goodwill Industries gradually spread across the United States, offering programs to help the "unemployables" enter the work force. By 1926, Helms was touring the world telling the story of Goodwill Industries and laying the groundwork for an international movement. When the Great Depression produced mass unemployment, Goodwill narrowed the focus of its services to people with disabilities.

Dr. Helms' vision set an early course for what is now a 2.4 billion dollar nonprofit organization. Today, Goodwill Industries International is the world's largest private-sector employer of people with disabilities and disadvantaged conditions. Dr. Helms' concept of providing "a chance and not charity," has expanded into 171 autonomous members in the U.S. and Canada, and 34 associate members in 22 countries outside of North America. His energy has helped thousands recognize and fill their individual roles in society and the workplace.


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