Beyond the Classroom: InfoSci Students Make an Impact at Goodwill
Two College of Information Science student capstone teams partnered with Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona to turn data, technology and fresh perspectives into real-world solutions.
The Beyond the Thrift senior capstone team of Vanessa Rivas-Davila, Brooke Hesse, Jasmine Rivero-Yribe, Seulgi Chung and Carolyn Zhao presents their final project to Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona leadership.
Photo courtesy Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona.
Walk into a Goodwill thrift store in Southern Arizona and you may soon find something new alongside the furniture: a tag with a QR code inviting you to discover the story behind your purchase.
Scan it, and instead of simply seeing what an item costs, you can learn more about the people and programs supported by Goodwill, from workforce development and career centers to reentry and youth programs.
The idea came not from a marketing agency or outside consultant, but from five University of Arizona College of Information Science students.
The Beyond the Thrift student team tabled at Goodwill stores to encourage Goodwill shoppers to provide feedback via the team's survey.
Photo courtesy Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona.
In fall 2025, students Vanessa Rivas-Davila, Jasmine Rivero-Yribe, Carolyn Zhao, Brooke Hesse and Seulgi Chung partnered with Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona for their senior capstone project, Beyond the Thrift: A Data-Driven Story of Goodwill’s Community Impact. Working with Goodwill staff and real organizational data, the team investigated a challenge the nonprofit had been wrestling with: many shoppers know Goodwill as a place to donate and buy secondhand goods, but far fewer understand the community programs those activities help support.
Their work did more than earn the Capstone Research Award at the University of Arizona iShowcase. Months later, Goodwill is putting some of their recommendations into practice.
“It was a great project,” says Jillian Sommers, senior marketing communications coordinator for Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona and a 2022 graduate of the college’s Bachelor of Arts in Information Science and eSociety (now Emerging Technologies in Society). “Those students went so in-depth, down so many different paths for us, which was really great. It didn’t require additional software or training the team on anything new. And they came up with such excellent ideas.”
One idea in particular stood out: connecting Goodwill merchandise directly to stories of community impact.
“We fell in love with their proposal,” Sommers says. “We realized it was such an easy way for us to move forward. They pitched it so beautifully, talking about how we wanted to make sure everyone came in contact with the mission. We know everyone is coming in contact with the items already in the thrift store, so let’s pair the mission with the items.”
Starting with a Real-World Question
The partnership began when Sommers returned to the college where she once studied.
She and Goodwill Marketing Director Matthew Flores attended iShowcase, the college’s biannual celebration of student projects, where they began exploring ways Goodwill could become more involved. “Matthew and I saw all the incredible work and projects that come out of the college,” she says.
That connection eventually led Goodwill into the senior capstone classroom.
Rather than arrive with a narrowly defined assignment, Goodwill presented students with a broad problem: How could the organization better communicate a mission that extends far beyond its thrift stores?
“People see us as a thrift store, but as a nonprofit, we do so much more than that,” Sommers says. “We go so much farther than just giving clothes a second chance.”
Sommers and Flores presented the organization’s mission before asking the students for ideas. “We had this really cool opportunity to meet with students and ask them: What would you do with your background, your knowledge, your skill set and our mission and data? How do we amplify our messaging?” Sommers says.
Students were invited to bring their own interests and skills to the problem. Some envisioned web or app solutions. Others focused on data, design or communication. Ultimately, two teams chose to spend the semester working with Goodwill.
That kind of open-ended challenge is central to the value of industry-sponsored capstones, says Susan Kaleita, College of Information Science director of strategic partnerships and external relations.
“I want every InfoSci student to graduate with real-world project experience and a professional network,” she says. “Industry-sponsored capstone projects are one way that students can apply what they’re learning in their courses to challenges from real work environments, while interacting with professionals throughout the semester.”
“We’re really grateful to our partners from industry and community organizations—including amazing InfoSci alumni like Jillian—who invest their time and energy in students by being project mentors,” she adds.
Tags designed to direct shoppers by QR code to existing Goodwill success stories are one of several innovative ideas proposed by the Beyond the Thrift capstone team.
Image courtesy Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona.
Turning Data Into Action
The Beyond the Thrift team poster provides data and methods, shopper insights, communication preferences, industry and market analysis, jobseeker insight, how the team identified gaps and recommendations highlights.
Image courtesy Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona.
For the Beyond the Thrift team, answering Goodwill’s question meant working across disciplines.
The students analyzed internal job-seeker and social media data, regional employment information and responses from a public-awareness survey. They used tools including Python, R, Jupyter Notebook, Node.js, Qualtrics, Excel and Canva to examine everything from shopping motivations and mission awareness to workforce patterns and communication preferences.
Their research identified a significant disconnect. Younger shoppers showed especially low awareness of Goodwill’s broader mission, even as they represented an important audience. Survey respondents indicated that personal stories were particularly effective for communicating impact, while the team’s analysis also found a relationship between awareness of Goodwill’s mission and repeat shopping and donating.
From that research came a suite of recommendations rather than a single product: changes to data collection and the Goodwill website, an interactive map and dashboard, a social media strategy and impact-linked price tags. The interactive dashboard, for example, brought together job-seeker demographics, program participation, employment outcomes and neighborhood-level information in an explorable map of Pima County.
For Sommers, watching the students work with Goodwill’s data was itself revealing.
“It was fascinating to watch their minds work and bring all that information back to us—and force us to think about things a little deeper than maybe we had before.”
Several of their ideas have continued beyond the semester. Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona is incorporating some of the team’s proposed website changes as it overhauls its site. And the impact-linked tags have moved even further.
Goodwill recently began beta testing the tags on furniture at one of its stores. The tags direct shoppers by QR code to existing Goodwill success stories, giving those stories a new path to an audience while allowing the organization to measure engagement.
Crucially, the concept fits the realities of the workplace where it will be used. “We want our production line to remain as seamless as possible, and the idea the students came up with absolutely made it that way for us,” Sommers says.
Goodwill operates 18 thrift stores in Southern Arizona, meaning a successful test could eventually give the idea considerably wider reach.
Two Teams, Two Approaches
The poster created by the Visualizing Community Impact team includes introduction, methods, data, analysis and conclusion highlights from the team's research project.
Image courtesy Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona.
A second capstone team—comprised of InfoSci students Abel Toledo, Kirill Klimashenko, Adilbek Zhanibek and Alisher Kuttiboyev—approached the same challenge from a different direction.
Their Visualizing Community Impact project proposed a “Goodwill Impact Tracker”: an interactive dashboard app designed to translate organizational data into accessible measures and stories of community impact.
The team surveyed 40 shoppers and donors and found that 67.5% did not understand Goodwill’s core mission, while nearly a third said they lacked clarity about how funds were used. Their prototype responded with features including a “Donation Journey,” personalized impact metrics and a recycling counter designed to make outcomes more tangible.
Goodwill is not currently developing the app itself, but Sommers says the project accomplished something equally valuable at an early stage.
“They did amazing ground research for us,” she says. “We weren’t expecting a full-blown app that was ready to hit the market. We were really just beginning to explore those steps ourselves.”
Sommers adds, “We came to the College of Information Science to help us ask questions that we didn’t even know to ask yet. The students did a wonderful job providing us with research that gives us a solid baseline from which to start and move forward.”
Preparing for What Comes Next
The Goodwill capstone experience illustrates why partnerships with industry and community organizations matter, particularly as the technologies and workplaces students will enter continue to change.
A classroom can teach students to analyze data, build digital tools, conduct research and develop communication strategies. A real partner adds something harder to simulate: imperfect data, operational constraints, competing priorities, evolving questions and people who will actually have to use what students create.
And the relationship can extend beyond the project itself.
After the semester ended, Sommers stayed connected with several members of the Beyond the Thrift team. One later asked her to serve as a professional reference—and got the job.
For Goodwill, an organization built around workforce development, that dimension of the partnership carries particular meaning.
“As a workforce development agency, we were honored to be a stepping stone, or in some cases a first step,” Sommers says. “That’s really special to us and to our mission—to be able to reach students and help them reach those first milestones. I hope other people see the impact you can have on someone’s career and someone’s life just by making that outreach and being a mentor, or a place for them to land.”
For InfoSci students, meanwhile, the experience offers insight into what their education is preparing them to do: take data, technology and ideas into environments where the answers are not already known and create something that makes a real impact.
Contact the College of Information Science industry partnerships team to learn more about capstone sponsorships and other ways to connect with InfoSci students.