Ryan Burgess, Goodwill Columbus CEO, Talks Plans for Future
The last year has been a busy one for Goodwill Columbus. The local branch of the national social services agency announced in January 2021 that it would be partnering with Elford to redevelop its headquarters at 1331 Edgehill Road in the Fifth by Northwest neighborhood just north of Grandview. The following month, Ryan Burgess, then-Cabinet Secretary for Gov. Mike DeWine, was announced as the organization’s next president and CEO, following the news that longtime leader Margie Pizzuti would be retiring. Burgess took over officially in March 2021, a year after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic that continued to create problems for businesses and nonprofits alike throughout 2021.
Columbus Monthly caught up with Burgess via Zoom to discuss his first 10 months at the helm of Goodwill Columbus, plans for the new headquarters and the pandemic’s effects on the agency’s myriad programs. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
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What has the last 10 months looked like for you? What challenges and successes have you experienced?
Well first, coming into this organization that is very, very well-respected across the community makes it a little bit easier for a transition. And then Margie Pizzuti was the CEO for about 15 years, and she just did a great job of creating greater awareness of what Goodwill does across our community. I had the chance to overlap with her for about two weeks. Everybody was still largely remote, so we did nonstop Zoom calls with supporters and funders of Goodwill. Having Margie provide that warm handoff—I’m very appreciative of that.
Then I made a commitment to having 100 conversations within my first 100 days with our employees and the individuals we serve. I’m proud to say I was able to achieve that goal. That was a lot of fun, just getting to spend time with our employees. We have a great team here, amazing employees, many of which have been here 20, 25, 30 years. They’ve committed themselves to the mission at Goodwill and are just extraordinary individuals.
Of course, the elephant in the room is dealing with the pandemic. The staffing challenges that businesses everywhere are facing—we’re facing the same pressures. Our team, they’ve been battling this for two years and I’m just in awe of their commitment and their energy level. Every day, they’re giving it their all, no matter how tired they are, no matter how stressed they are. They just feel a strong commitment to the individuals we serve. Having the opportunity to lead an organization filled with individuals like this, I just feel very fortunate.
I watched the recording of your Extraordinary People Event from last October, and it really painted a great picture of how broad Goodwill Columbus’ services are. I think everyone is familiar with thrift shopping at Goodwill stores, but maybe less so with some of the other services, right?
That’s the beauty of Goodwill’s brand—everyone knows it because of our retail locations and our donation centers, but one of the things I’m tasked with doing is getting out and telling the bigger story about all the other programs and services we offer. We run a custodial business; we run a security business; we have our adult day program, supported living, workforce programs. It’s a very diverse organization in terms of the services that we deliver.
Let’s talk about how the clients you serve have been affected by the pandemic. I think there’s a lot of conversation about how isolation in nursing homes has been really detrimental for folks’ health, but I’ve seen less conversation about isolation in group homes or not having access to adult day centers. Can you tell us a little about that challenge?
I think the profile of Charlotte—she’s one of our artists in the studio—from the Extraordinary People video, you probably got a sense from her that, like many of the individuals we serve, the fact that they didn’t have our Edgehill campus to come to clearly had a significant impact on their mental health. Many of them are still dealing with that challenge. I hear from our employees that they [the clients] can have some pretty tough days, from a mental health perspective.
Our employees are trying to get individuals out in the community as much as they can that’s safe, because just getting out in the community is so important to the individuals we serve. Our employees are doing everything they can to try to make life as normal as possible, but it’s still incredibly challenging—especially the last couple of months.
But I’m hopeful that in the next couple months, we’ll turn a corner and we’ll get more of our individuals out into the community and that they’ll be able to attend some of the programs that we have here at Edgehill more.
What’s your status now in terms of what facilities are open and what services are available?
We’re fully open. And this is one of the things that just amazes me about our employees: We have about 1,100 employees, and 1,000 of them, the overwhelming majority, they have been in the trenches since Day One. These are individuals that haven’t had the privilege of working remotely. They have shown up at our clients’ buildings to clean and to provide security; they have shown up in our supported living houses to provide care; they’ve shown up at our stores. We are seeing on the adult day side, there’s still a little bit of hesitation for individuals to come back, and that’s understandable, because we work with a lot of folks who have medical conditions so they have to be very careful about the exposure they have.
Shifting gears, let’s talk about plans for your new headquarters. That was announced about a year ago; what developments have been made since?
It’s a very exciting project; it’s going to be transformative for Goodwill. Since then, we’ve officially entered into an agreement with Elford, they are our developers. Quick background: A little over 6 acres here at Edgehill and Fifth, essentially half the property, will be sold to Elford, and they’ll develop apartments. On the northern half of the property, along Fifth Avenue, we’ll retain that piece of property and build an approximately 40,000-square-foot building. The first floor will be one of our retail locations and our art studio, so individuals with disabilities can come in for programming. We’re trying to figure out how to rebuild the art studio, as well as some space for adult day services. And then on the second floor will be administrative offices and workforce training space. We’re in the design phase with architects right now. And we’ve started the zoning process, so that will take some time to work through.
One of the neat things about this new campus is, there’s just a lot of young people in the area, which is great. There’s so much energy, so we’re asking ourselves, how can we design a campus that feels very welcoming, very inclusive to those young people. So not only do we want them to be Goodwill shoppers and Goodwill donors, but are there other ways that they can support Goodwill? Because, again, everybody knows our stores, but not everybody knows about all the other programs and services that we provide. So I’m really excited about the opportunity to create greater awareness with younger residents in the area.
Where will individuals be able to access services you provide there now, like the art studio, during the demolition and construction phases?
We are working on transitional spaces for our offices, and we have hub sites across our footprint where individuals can go for programs. This is one of the exciting things, strategically, for us. What we’re trying to do is push more of our programs and services out into the neighborhoods throughout the community. We’ve kind of had the “mothership” model where everybody comes to Edgehill; we’re now moving toward the direction where more of our programs and services are spread out across different locations in the county.
With zoning, if all goes well, we could be moving forward in the second half of 2022. I think construction would take a little more than a year, so moving back in is probably a 2023 event.
What else should people know about the redevelopment project?
The strategic goal that the board has given me—I refer to it as our 2030 goal—we are going to equip 100,000 people with the tools to advance economic mobility through the power of work by 2030. So the way we equip and advance people can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. We’ll be expanding out and developing partnerships with fellow nonprofits, school districts and Columbus State to find ways that we can tap into individuals and help them achieve economic mobility. But what’s so exciting about this Edgehill redevelopment project is, it’s going to help us expand our scope and presence in the community to help us…
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