I hope everyone realizes that the Seattle area Goodwill alone employs thousands of people. Same thing with the United Way, not everything is done by volunteers alone. You have to have people who know how to do things like Payroll and pay taxes or do other things and you can't do that out of your garage. They provide training and job education. Here they contract to deal with electronic recycling, some of which they do themselves. Other things are sorted and turned to specialists.
I hope that everyone realizes the vast amount of garbage Americans produce and that something needs to be done with this stuff other than shove it in the ground. It used to be that other countries were willing to buy our garbage and get the value out of it, they aren't so willing any more and we produce tons of trash every day.
Back in the 70s they were teaching me "reduce, reuse, recycle". The typical American way of life, however, is to buy buy buy. Whether we buy from a purely profit motivated company like Value Village (if I'm going to slam anyone...) or Goodwill, or our church basement sale, we are at least doing something to keep it out of the landfill.