Goodwill Industries of Kentucky CEO Amy Luttrell recently joined a panel of nonprofit executives to shed light on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the sector.
In Louisville Business First’s Executive Insights: Nonprofits panel, Luttrell discussed the difficult measures Goodwill has been forced to take as a result of the pandemic – store closures and subsequent furloughs, layoffs and revenue loss – and how the nonprofit has pivoted to offer services despite those measures.
She had this to say about Goodwill’s primary focus in wake of its stores reopening:
“ … in our own case, we tend to be pretty stable financially, but the level of our store sales determines how many career coaches we can hire, and that determines how many people we can provide our services to. So we’re concentrating on running our business as well as we can so that we have the money to hire as many career coaches as we can, and also reaching out for outside funding.
It’s a really uncertain time, and we’re doing everything that we can here to be as strong as we can because we know so many people are going to be looking for a job here shortly as unemployment benefits expire, and we want to be ready to assist them.”
Luttrell also offered a broader insight on the state of the sector:
“I think we’re going to see probably a good number of mergers resulting from this. And I think that can be a good solution. I don’t see a lot of nonprofits wanting to merge unless their backs are against the wall, but a lot are going to have our backs against the wall and will have to consider that whether they want to or not. If you’re looking at two financially weak organizations merging, sometimes I’ve not seen that work out very well. You just get a financially weak organization that’s a little bit larger. But nonprofits tend to operate on a pretty lean administrative staff, so when you look for things to cut, usually there are not many places to go besides your services and, of course, you don’t want to do that.”
For the full article and more from Luttrell and other executives, including Hal Hedley, CEO of Ronald McDonald House Charities of Kentuckiana, Lindsay Wehr, senior vice president of strategy and outreach for Kosair Charities and Brett Bachmann, CEO of Heuser Hearing Institute, visit the link or open the PDF provided below: