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February 19, 2018
By Arkansas Business Staff
Photo by Karen E. Segrave
Ben Goodwin, 39, was named executive director of the nonprofit Our House in September, replacing longtime director Georgia Mjartan. He was assistant director of Our House, which provides support and services for homeless adults and children, for six years. He previously was a grant writer under Dominik Mjartan, Georgia Mjartan’s husband, at Southern Bancorp Community Partners.
Goodwin graduated from Hendrix College in Conway with a mathematics degree and was a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford in England.
Our House, the 2015 ABOY winner for nonprofit of the year, has a staff of more than 100 and serves more than 1,600 individuals a year, including 500 daily.
How did you get involved with nonprofit work?
Around [the time of joining Our House in 2009], a traumatic personal experience changed my life and honed my focus. My introduction to parenthood came when my wife went into preterm labor, and our daughter Ruby was born at 24 weeks’ gestation, clinging for life and requiring months of intensive care at Arkansas Children’s Hospital.
During her excruciating six months in the NICU, I got a strong taste of the trauma and uncertainty that homeless families experience. My family needed a lot of help, but we got it from our family and friends and the wonderful team at ACH, and now our thriving 8-year-old daughter is a beautiful testament to the power of families to overcome, if they have the right support from their community.
Our House has received awards and accolades for its success. How do you build on that?
Our House has a model that works for empowering families and individuals to work their way out of homelessness, but we also seek to be continually learning, finding ways to increase our effectiveness and expand our impact. I’m working with our board and staff to update our strategic plan for the next five years, and the ideas and energy coming out of that process are inspiring.
The truth is that the need in our community is still great, and in the face of this need we will not rest on our laurels, but do everything we can to meet the challenge head-on.
What are the misconceptions about homeless people?
People in our community generally are very compassionate when it comes to their homeless neighbors, but I think people tend to underestimate the difficulty involved in climbing out of homelessness. Homelessness is always a symptom of other problems, and problems build on each other.
Consider a homeless single mother with three children. With challenges [child care, health care and housing expenses] piled on top of the tremendous challenge of simply raising children on her own, it’s no wonder that more than 50 percent of homeless mothers experience major depression. Our mission is to join in partnership with this single mother and others like her who are working hard for themselves and their families, to provide education, guidance and encouragement to magnify the investment they are making in themselves.
Did being named ABOY nonprofit of the year in 2015 help the organization?
Being named ABOY Nonprofit of the Year in 2015 was a huge momentum boost. It gave us confidence that our ambitious efforts to expand and enhance our services were supported by our community. It gave us a credential we were able to leverage to position ourselves as a national model for empowering homeless families and individuals.
And it also gave us validation that our work is valued by the business community, which is so crucial to our success. Businesses are vital partners in our work, not just as donors and volunteers, but also as employers of our clients.
