Tim O'Neal, CEO of Goodwill of Central and Northern Arizona

With nearly three decades of experience working in the thrift industry, Tim O’Neal has spent the past 23 years focused on the vision of ending poverty through the power of work.When O’Neal was brought on with Goodwill of Central Arizona, the organization was in serious financial trouble and at risk of having its membership removed by Goodwill Industries International. O’Neal’s arrival marked a turning point in the 75 year history of the organization, and his leadership was instrumental in keeping the organization running by increasing retail operations by 3000 percent during his tenure as the Vice President of Retail Operations (1999 – 2007).

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
iHeartMedia presents national CEOs. You should know. Let's meet Tim O'Neil,
CEO of Goodwill of Central and Northern Arizona.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Good Will it's truly a legacy brand. I mean, how
many organizations do you know that last one hundred and
twenty plus years. And so part of what we have
to do is we have to showcase and mission changes.
So when you go back and you think about in
the seventies and the way that we looked at helping
people that were in the most distressed, severely disabled, mentally ill,
whatever it may be, we actually did things like kidding,
which meant we put together like your new homeowner kit

(00:31):
from at that time, like the telephone company or whatever
it may have been. We did things like we helped
build boat covers for Bimini boats, and those were all
things that were simple tasks or easy to do. But
what happened with those folks is once those industries went away,
they weren't trained for the real world anymore. And so
we went from that and we had to transition into
things like really teaching them soft skills, then teaching them
just life skills, and then teaching them how to work

(00:53):
in a traditional employment environment to make them the best
they can be. And so mission for us changes with
the times for whatever's and so that's why for us,
telling the story constantly is important.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
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