The Goodwill of Kona

The Goodwill Hunter welcomes guest bloggers – Cathy Thunell and Ken Leung.  Cathy started at Goodwill in October, 2008 as the Senior Store Manager at the Hilo location. She thoroughly enjoys working with all of the Goodwill family members and seeing how they’re impacting the community by providing reasonably priced goods and textiles to all that shop at Goodwill.

Ken joined the Goodwill organization in 2002 as the Store Manager of the Beretania location. In subsequent years, he’s managed the store in Kaimuki, then became the Operations Manager, and Redemption Manager. In 2010, he was promoted to Director of Retail Sales.

Here’s the blog write-up by Cathy Thunell and Ken Leung:

We are excited to have a store in Kona after many years in the planning stage. The Kona Goodwill store is centrally located on Kanalani street, just down the road from Home Depot (next to Tesoro) at 74-4786 Kanalani St. in the Kaloko Industrial Park, near Costco. Store hours will be from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. With over 5,000 square feet of sales floor space, customers in Kona are now finally able to find great values in one of our Goodwill Stores. With this second store on Hawaii Island, we are able to expand our presence and the money generated will be used to further our mission to help people with employment barriers find jobs and gain financial independence.

So many members of our Goodwill family were involved in opening the Kona Store. Starting with the maintenance team – they did a phenomenal job in a very short period of time.  Next, there was the IT team that worked hard at insuring the Kona store computers and the POS system were up and running on opening day.  A big-shout out to Norine Gasilos, manager of the Pearl Store and Eunice Sim for all of the hard work they did to insure everything was in place and stocked prior to the opening of the store. And we will not forget all of the hard work and planning provided by the newest members of our team, Stirling Conrad, Gerry Colyn and Michelle Germond – the Kona store management team. They worked diligently at preparing the store for the opening.

This store, in combination with our existing Hilo store, will give residents on both sides of the island an opportunity to save money and donate their items. More importantly, the new store will create job opportunities and provide job training to area residents.

Donations help strengthen the community by supporting Goodwill’s job training and placement programs, as well as help to make a healthier planet through recycling and reusing items and reducing what is going into Hawaii’s landfills.

The soft-opening of the store was on November 4, 2011 where we saw a steady stream of excited customers. There were numerous comments made by our customers as to how happy they were that we are in Kona now and that there is such a large need within the community for a store such as ours.  Some of the customers stated that they would no longer need to make the long drive to Hilo to find bargains – they only had to go down the street to shop in Kona now.

President/CEO Laura Robertson Smith (pictured left) and the team including VP of Business Operations, Ryan Kusumoto.

We were honored to have our President/CEO, Laura Robertson Smith and our new VP of Business Operations, Ryan Kusumoto stop by to visit the Kona Store on opening day. They seemed happy with all of the work we had done and were impressed by the amount of customers present while they were at the store. All went well throughout the day and we finished day-one with a very satisfied and proud team.

The public Grand Opening of the Kona Goodwill Store is officially on Saturday, December 3, 2011. located at 74-4786 Kanalani St. in the Kaloko Industrial Park, near Costco. Store hours will be from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday.

Visit higoodwill.org for more information and to subscribe to the Goodwill Works! email newsletter. Information is also available via 836-9675, info@higoodwill.org, @GoodwillHawaii on Twitter, and Goodwill Industries of Hawaii on Facebook.

We wish to thank everyone involved who helped us with the opening of this new store and we welcome all of you to stop by and check out the Goodwill of Kona.