What it Means to be a Social Enterprise

Blue Box Solutions was born out of over 50 years of experience as a social enterprise in the Miami and South Florida market. As a branded line of business of Goodwill Industries of South Florida, Blue Box Solutions will continue to focus on providing job opportunities to people with disabilities and other barriers to employment. We do this by working with partners like you who want to grow their business while also working with a team that is focused on doing good for the community. 

Goodwill South Florida was founded in 1952 in a very different and smaller Miami. As the local community grew, so did the need to help find employment for people with disabilities. With this growing community need, we started creating entrepreneurial lines of business to help those we support by creating jobs that we could place people in. 

Starting as a traditional thrift store model, we expanded in the 1980s with our Janitorial Services Division that has grown to employ over 250 people in the local community who clean over 5M square feet of federal, state, and local office spaces in Broward, Miami-Dade, and Monroe Counties. If you’ve stepped in any of these buildings, you’ve probably seen the amazing work our teams do!

In the early 1990s, Goodwill South Florida expanded into Apparel Manufacturing for the US Government. This began with military uniforms and has expanded to producing the Interment Flag for the Department of Veteran’s Affairs. Currently, we employ over 850 sewing operators in our facility in Miami. We invest in training and job growth for our operators, which leads to us producing one million pieces of military apparel and individual equipment for the US Government annually. 

In 2014, our Commercial Laundry facility was launched. In true social enterprise fashion, we located this facility in a historically underdeveloped part of Miami called Liberty City. We intentionally placed this facility there to provide jobs for people in the community who had barriers to employment, including homelessness, ex-incarceration, and disabilities. We provide employment to over 80 individuals in this and launder over 40 million pounds of hospital linens annually for our local hospital partners in a state of the art, sustainable laundry facility. 

Blue Box Solutions has grown from our multi-faceted background of diverse lines of business. We began working with the US Army on solving a major logistical problem they had. This partnership grew and resulted in us launching Blue Box Solutions to bring our social enterprise approach developed with our Army customer to commercial partners to help them solve challenges and grow their businesses. We’ve invested in new commercial warehouse space to support our growth in job creation for the local community and to help our commercial partners. 

We continue to grow with sourcing and kitting projects with the US Army, repurposing and textile circularity efforts, warehousing, and traditional and e-commerce fulfillment. Find out what it is like to work with a social enterprise as a partner in growth! Contact us today to help with your needs.