Goodwill is a charitable institution in this city, now being consumed in a sewer fire of thundering incompetence or epic callousness, or both. It’s saddening, and enraging.

I grew up thinking of “Goodwill” as the generic name for the do-gooder second-hand store where you (especially if you were poor) could shop cheaply, and where everyone could ensure a second life for their old clothes and household items.

I remember the seasonal routine of packing up old clothes for Goodwill as a child. I remember a high school friend, poor and flat broke in Scarborough, going there to pick up black shoes and a white shirt required for a new job as a waiter. I remember bulk buying clothing for a buck a pound at the downtown “Buy the Pound” warehouse during the grunge ’90s, and I furnished more than one apartment from its store showrooms.

That is, Goodwill has been a small but consistent part of my life for as long as I can remember, as it has been for many Torontonians. Useful and convenient (whether you needed to buy or wanted to donate), but better yet a charity we all know gave work to people with disabilities and other employment barriers that meant they’d otherwise have a hard time finding a job.

And while some of us get wistful, it is those employees who are bearing the brunt of the wreckage caused by the company’s apparent mismanagement. When all of the chain’s 16 Toronto stores were shuttered suddenly Sunday, with no notice to either the public or the staff, those employees were left in the cold. They are not, as of yet, getting any severance pay. They have not been given the paperwork they’d need to qualify for employment insurance. They are not even being paid Friday (as scheduled) for the work they’ve already done.

Some of these workers have been working for Goodwill for close to minimum wage for decades. And now they get the shaft. “I’ve got members who are not going to eat tonight,” a union steward told reporters Thursday.

“I have a little son. I have a family I’ve got to support. And if I don’t have money in the bank, how do I do that?” truck driver Chane Clark (16 years on the job) asked the Star.

“We have nothing,” Raphelia Debique, who supports her six family members on her Goodwill paycheque, told my colleague Sara Mojtehedzadeh. And then Debique pointed out the cruel irony. “We’re the people with the barriers that they vowed to hire. To help.”

Which is why this is more egregious than your run-of-the-mill troubled-company-screws-its-employees story: Goodwill is a charitable organization whose primary charitable activity was providing employment opportunities to the downtrodden. Now it is trodding them down further.

And they have offered no defensible excuse for it: the explanation is apparently that the changing retail market and high rents mean the thrift store model is not viable anymore. It’s possible to imagine, in a retail environment where even corporate titans like Target and Walmart are facing a tough go of things, that even under good management the charitable model might not have been sustainable. It’s possible, though not a sure thing: Goodwill got millions in government grants and, as a retail operation, got its products donated free. But still. It’s possible to imagine good managers needing to close the stores.

But Goodwill was very clearly not benefitting from any such good management here. Because no competent executive running a $30-million-a-year enterprise would be so taken off-guard by the business climate that it would need to shut down immediately and default on its payroll. CEO Keiko Nakamura — of whom most of the public last heard when she was being shown the door in 2011, after a spending scandal at her last job as head of Toronto Community Housing — says it’s a “cash-flow crisis.” But an executive who doesn’t see a cash crunch like this coming — one Nakamura says, remember, was caused by a changing marketplace and lease terms, not a natural disaster — is a bum, plain and simple.

What about the board, who all apparently signed off on this plan before resigning en masse? How did a group of experienced and savvy business people preside over this fiasco? What kind of oversight were they providing as this 80-year-old ship cruised full-speed into an iceberg?

Here’s a clue: “We support Ms. Nakamura’s continued leadership in finding and implementing long-term solutions needed,” the board members reportedly wrote in their resignation letter, signed by chair Michael Eubanks. “She is a capable and strong leader who is determined to see through the next chapter for Goodwill. We stand behind her and the decision currently made in this situation.”

Nope. Nope, nope, nope.

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These people have not just presided over the downfall of a beloved charity, but in the manner they’ve done so, they have inflicted suffering on the people they were given a public trust to help.