Two Lancaster-area nonprofits will each receive $5,000 from local Meijer employees on Meijer Team Gives Day, Tuesday, November 10, according to a community announcement reported by the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette. The recipients are the STAR MH Foundation and the Fairfield Area Humane Society, chosen by the Lancaster store team itself.
According to the announcement reported by the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette, employees chose the organizations based on local needs, personal connections and their impact in the community. The team was drawn to youth and teen suicide awareness, the focus the announcement associates with the STAR MH Foundation, and also wanted to support the care of local animals, according to that announcement.
During Team Gives Day celebrations, Meijer employees will present the donations to the nonprofits their stores selected, according to the announcement reported by the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette. Participating stores can give $10,000 to one organization or split it into two $5,000 donations — Lancaster chose to split its gift, so both local groups benefit.
Nine other stores in the region are also participating in Meijer Team Gives Day, according to the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette. That regional reach means the Lancaster gifts are part of a wider day of employee-directed giving, while the choices themselves stayed local — made by people who work in the store and live in the community it serves.
The Fairfield Area Humane Society is a private, nonprofit, no-kill organization at 1721 Granville Pike in Lancaster, according to the society’s own site. It offers adoptions, a low-cost spay and neuter and wellness clinic, grooming, boarding and a public dog park — the everyday services that keep pets healthy and help them find homes in Fairfield County.
The society’s roots run deep in Lancaster. According to background published by the Fairfield Area Humane Society, the Fairfield County branch of the Ohio State Humane Society was formed in February 1886 at Lancaster City Hall, and the organization became a small nonprofit agency around 1980. Executive Director Corey Schoonover leads the society today, according to its own site.
For an organization with that history, a $5,000 employee-chosen gift is both practical help and a public vote of confidence. Donations of this kind support the unglamorous essentials — food, medicine, cleaning, clinic time — that determine how many animals a no-kill shelter can take in and how quickly they can be placed with families.
The other half of the Lancaster gift speaks to a different kind of care. Youth and teen suicide awareness is the work the announcement ties to the STAR MH Foundation, and the store team’s decision to direct money toward it puts mental-health awareness for young people alongside animal welfare as the two causes Lancaster employees chose to lift up this year.
The Team Gives programme itself is built on that employee-choice idea. According to Meijer’s own newsroom, the programme began in 2021, and each store, distribution and supply-chain location can donate $10,000 to a local nonprofit, or two at $5,000 each, with team members choosing where the money goes.
In last year’s campaign, Meijer said the programme totalled about $3 million to more than 500 organizations, and nearly $15 million since 2021. Those are the programme’s history figures from Meijer — this year’s Lancaster story is smaller and closer to home: two $5,000 gifts, chosen in Lancaster, for Lancaster-area work.
That employee-choice structure is what separates Team Gives from a corporate cheque written at headquarters. The people deciding are the people who stock the shelves and run the registers in Lancaster — neighbours of the families who adopt from the humane society and of the young people the STAR MH Foundation’s awareness work is meant to reach. When a store team splits its gift in two, it is usually because both causes walked through its own doors in some form during the year.
Fairfield County has seen that kind of giving compound before: small, local, repeated gifts keep a no-kill shelter’s clinic running and keep awareness work visible in schools and community spaces where teenagers actually are. Neither $5,000 gift will end the need it addresses — and neither organization pretends otherwise in the announcement reported by the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette — but both arrive with something a larger, distant grant often does not: the names of local people who chose them on purpose.
What happens next: the presentations happen on Meijer Team Gives Day, Tuesday, November 10, when Lancaster employees hand the donations to the STAR MH Foundation and the Fairfield Area Humane Society. For the humane society, residents who want to help beyond the gift can find adoption and clinic information on its own site — and for both organizations, the day is a reminder that local employees, given the choice, chose home.