By Staff
SOUTH BEND, Ind. - Goodwill Industries of Michiana Inc. has begun construction on a new Goodwill retail store in Niles.
It will be located at Silverbrook Avenue and 11th Street and should be open sometime around the end of the year, Goodwill officials said this morning in a press release.
J. Larry Neff, president and CEO of Goodwill, said, "We closed our downtown Niles store in February due to the limited retail space making it impossible to operate the store efficiently and profitably. We have been looking for another retail site in Niles to open a larger store for a very long time and we believe this site across the street from Martin's Supermarket will be an ideal location for our shoppers with about 10,000 square feet of retail space and for our donors, since the new store will have an attended drive-thru to accept donated items. After closing the downtown store, we were amazed at the response we received from the citizens of Niles encouraging us to accelerate our search and to open again as soon as possible."
In 2003, 5,256 people received job-training services from Goodwill and 851 were placed into competitive jobs in the community.