Goodwill opens Tattersall Park donation center

Dropping off items to donate has never been easier.

Alabama Goodwill Industries opened a new attended donation center in Tattersall Park on March 3.

When dropping off donations, a donor can drive up to the curb, where an employee will greet customers outside the door, unload their donations and give them a receipt, with the customer never having to leave their vehicle.

“It’s a little different concept to what we see around central and northern Alabama,” said David Wells, president and CEO of Alabama Goodwill. “The concept is in many Goodwill locations all across the country. It’s meant to be quick, easy and convenient.”

Wells said the company did a market study that identifies where households are likely to be around major roads that have a lot of traffic, and the area around Tattersall was in a good demographic area with good household incomes.

The first attended donation center in the Birmingham area opened in August on Oporto Madrid Boulevard, and Wells said it has been doing well.

“This one is more like the model we intend to try to have,” he said.

Donors who come can feel proud that their donations are going to help to create jobs for those who need them the most and to help fund Goodwill’s mission.

The Tattersall location created four full-time jobs. Depending on how busy the site is, the model generally calls for one attendant for every 40 to 60 donations per day. If it becomes closer to 80 to 100, there will be two people working at the site.

As donations are brought in, the employees take it into the store and sort them into categories and put them in corresponding bins. As they fill up, a truck will come pick up the items and take them to a location to be sold.

“There are nine stores around northern Alabama, and we are going to build more,” Wells said. “We have four to five in the works.”

Wells said most people don’t understand what Goodwill does. Beyond just accepting donations or people shopping the stores, Goodwill provides a number of services for those in the community who need help. Those who have had difficulties or are working to get on their feet and become self-sufficient and become productive members of the community.

“We do that in a variety of ways,” he said. “Our development programs get referrals from the Alabama Department of Rehab Services, and we will do an evaluation to see what each person needs. We have jobs to put them in and work to find the right role for a person.”

Goodwill also does job placement by helping place people in the community in a well-paying job with benefits. There is also the Smart Work Ethics program, in which Goodwill partners with high schools around Birmingham to provide training classes on how to be successful in work. For high school students who have a disability, they can get work experience at Goodwill to help them develop skills they can use after high school.

“At the very essence, we create jobs through the very generous and kind donations the community brings to us, and with those jobs, we bring people in who have barriers to employment and help them become self-sufficient and reach their life goals.”