Fred Keller, CEO of Cascade Engineering, and a member of the Bush Administration's Manufacturing Council, recently received the Lauren Wondergem Distinguished Business Partner award from Goodwill Industries of Grand Rapids. His acceptance remarks, excerpted on this page, convey the strength of his commitment to good business, Goodwill and his community.

In most manufacturing environments, employee training programs focus on issues of quality control, technical upgrades and safety. At Cascade Engineering, a leading developer of injection-molded products, workers also meet for presentations about poverty and discrimination. Sensitivity to such issues has helped ensure the success of a recruitment program forged in partnership with Goodwill Industries of Greater Grand Rapids six years ago. Since then, Cascade has hired more than 220 Goodwill graduates. Of its total workforce of 800, 122 employees have disabilities or other disadvantages.

Michigan Manufacturer Values ‘Corporate Opportunity’ in Goodwill Partnership

Thank you for this honor. It means a lot to me personally, and to the employees of Cascade Engineering. We have quite a remarkable, wonderful history of working with Goodwill. We have hired many people directly from Goodwill programs….

Goodwill has been with us since the beginning stages of learning what worked and did not work in our Welfare-to-Career program…. Goodwill had retention specialists in our factories at all hours of the night in order to support new hires that were making the difficult transition from welfare to a regular working environment. They were doing the work that our supervisors were not trained for, and frankly, did not have the time for…. We now have over 100 people working at Cascade Engineering that were formerly on welfare….

We are also very proud of employees like John Berg [pseudonym], now working as an inspector at Cascade Engineering. John was born with Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism that causes him to have an obsessive attention to detail. With the help of Goodwill and his family, we learned how to use his obsessive ability to detect quality defects during the production process. We learned from Goodwill how to focus on his ability not his disability….

So why do this?

It is the right thing to do. Some like to call it “corporate responsibility.” I think that sounds like people “wagging their finger” at corporate America. I think it is about corporate opportunity! We not only have the opportunity to make a buck, we have the opportunity to provide dignity and pride to hundreds of people….

But it is also an economic development engine. When people leave the roles of dependency on the state to become taxpayers, the community moves from paying out, to receiving tax dollars. It only makes sense that we play our part. Cascade now saves the state of Michigan over $800,000 a year in welfare payments they don't have to make….

I have come to understand what makes Goodwill so unique - working through the barriers to see the possibilities!

Source: Working! Fall 2004

To find out more about the training opportunities and job placement services provided by your local Goodwill, visit the Goodwill Locator.

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