Like many others, Romaine Seguin’s standpoint shifted all the way through the peak of the pandemic. As president of UPS World Freight Forwarding, she was once managing tens of hundreds of frontline workers, running to ship essential provides like vaccines and private protecting apparatus. “All of us noticed the tales… and [I realized] that is larger than industry; that is larger than profits according to percentage. That is simply incredible,” she says.
Seguin sought after to provide again. After spending 38 years with UPS, she joined Good360 and served as CEO from 2022 to 2024, when she determined to pursue different ventures. In 2023, because of her management, Good360 was once named No. 2 on Forbes’ America’s Top 100 Charities listing.
Beginning out
When she started her first activity at 23 years outdated, Seguin by no means imagined she would spend just about 4 a long time with the similar corporate. “I used to be an athlete in faculty, and I sought after to stick in form, so I got to work at UPS, unloading trailers at 3:30 within the morning,” she remembers. As soon as Seguin’s superiors discovered she had some extent in advertising control, they driven her towards a control monitor. “That’s how I were given began, and the remaining is historical past,” she says. “I began to stick in form, after which something resulted in any other.”
Seguin held 22 other positions all over her 38-year tenure with the corporate. In the end, she was the president of UPS World Freight Forwarding, honing her world provide chain and logistics experience. She oversaw air, ocean and rail-freight forwarding in addition to brokerage and provider control for 220 international locations and territories world wide. Even all the way through the commercial demanding situations of COVID-19, her paintings led to double-digit expansion.
A shift in standpoint and goal
Managing a significant, very important corporate all the way through a fancy time made her take into accounts her subsequent bankruptcy. Seguin, who’d sat on nonprofit forums, sought after to do one thing to provide again.
That’s when she were given the decision. A few board individuals from Good360 contacted her about filling the function of leader govt officer. Good360, based totally in Alexandria, Virginia, is a world chief in product philanthropy and functional giving, serving nonprofit organizations by means of giving them get right of entry to to product donations that let them to run their systems extra successfully and sustainably.
In December 2021, she retired from UPS and took in this management function—the brand new problem she was once yearning. She spent just about 40 years managing bundle supply. At Good360, she led a company that rescues and redistributes returned items that may in a different way finally end up in landfills.
Creating a distinction
Most of the people don’t notice what number of shopper merchandise are returned once a year. In 2022, 9.5 billion kilos of returns ended up in landfills, in step with Optoro, a generation corporate that is helping outlets and types organize returned and extra stock. But, just about part of families within the nation can not manage to pay for elementary necessities, like private care merchandise, cleansing merchandise, clothes and family items.
During the last 40 years, Good360 has labored with over 400 company companions and 100,000 nonprofit individuals to distribute over $18 billion value of goods that can have in a different way ended up in landfills, filling the space between what’s to be had and what tens of millions of other people want. Those merchandise come from main retail companions, together with Amazon, Disney, Macy’s and extra. Thus far, Good360 has definitely impacted over 100 million other people globally.
Seguin is happy with the paintings she and her just about 80 colleagues have achieved. “It’s all about serving the underserved communities and ensuring product will get out to somebody [who] wishes a couple of trainers or somebody [who] wishes a bed, somebody [who] wishes a jacket on their shoulders at evening,” she says. Good360 is helping firms clear up a industry downside by means of getting an overabundance of goods into the fingers of nonprofits that serve their communities, Seguin says.
Environmental advantages
Those efforts have led to fantastic environmental advantages as neatly. The gang’s 2023 Have an effect on Document highlights how 156 million kilos of overall weight of goods had been diverted from landfills through the years. “[The organization is] all about other people and planet,” Seguin says. “[Good360 wants] to handle other people, but in addition simply as importantly, [they] wish to handle the planet. [They] don’t desire a pair of trainers finishing up in a landfill. [They] don’t desire a football ball finishing up in a landfill as a result of [they] can put it to make use of in underserved communities.”
Good360 makes a distinction in the slightest degree wasteful manner imaginable. The community of warehouses is designed to position items the place they’re wanted, when they’re wanted and as in the community as imaginable to attenuate commute time and carbon emissions.
Seguin was once particularly eager about Good360 systems in movement. Advance Auto Parts partnered with Good360 to offer extra merchandise to nonprofits that teach mechanics. “They’ve a spot to donate their merchandise that might educate other people,” she says. “This can be a complete circle.”
This newsletter firstly gave the impression within the January/February 2025 factor of SUCCESS Mag.
Picture courtesy of Good360