Two Lancaster nonprofits will each receive $5,000 from the people who stock the shelves and run the registers at their local Meijer store, after store employees chose the STAR MH Foundation and the Fairfield Area Humane Society as this year’s local recipients for Meijer Team Gives Day on Tuesday, November 10, according to a community announcement reported by the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette.
The gifts were not picked by a corporate office. According to the announcement reported by the Eagle-Gazette, store employees chose the organizations themselves, based on local needs, personal connections and the impact each group has in the community — and the two picks say a lot about what the Lancaster team sees around it every day: young people who need mental-health support, and animals who need care and homes.
The announcement said the team was drawn to youth and teen suicide awareness, and also wanted to support the care of local animals, the Eagle-Gazette reported. Splitting the money put one gift behind each of those concerns — $5,000 for the STAR MH Foundation and $5,000 for the Fairfield Area Humane Society.
Meijer Team Gives Day works the same way across participating stores. During the Team Gives Day celebrations, employees present the donations to the nonprofit organizations selected by workers at their stores, according to the announcement. A participating store can give its full $10,000 to a single organization or split it into two $5,000 donations, as the Lancaster store chose to do. Nine other stores in the region are also taking part in Team Gives Day, the announcement said.
For the Fairfield Area Humane Society, the gift lands at an organization that has been part of Lancaster life for generations. The society, at 1721 Granville Pike in Lancaster, describes itself on its own site as an independent, nonprofit, no-kill organization offering adoption, veterinary and wellness care, boarding, spay and neuter services, grooming and an on-site dog park. Its roots reach back to 1886, when a Fairfield County branch humane society was formed in Lancaster.
Support like the Meijer gift is the society’s lifeblood. In a letter on its site, the society explains that membership and community support help provide vaccinations, spay and neuter surgeries, emergency medical treatment, food, shelter and the everyday care that gives animals a chance at a better life — the unglamorous, constant work behind every adoption photo.
That everyday care is easy to picture at the society’s Granville Pike home: adoptions for dogs and cats, a wellness veterinary clinic working by appointment, low-cost spay and neuter services, boarding and grooming, and a public dog park — the full front door of animal welfare in Fairfield County, all under one roof and all funded locally, according to the society’s own site. A $5,000 employee-chosen gift does not remake that operation, but it arrives as the kind of flexible, community-raised support a small nonprofit can put straight to work on food, medicine and shelter.
The other half of the split speaks to a harder local conversation. By putting youth and teen suicide awareness at the center of their choice, the employees used a workplace giving day to say, in public, that young people’s mental health in Fairfield County matters to the adults who bag their families’ groceries and greet them at the door. Employee-directed giving programs work best exactly this way: the people closest to a community spot needs that a distant grants committee might never see.
Stories like this one are a reminder that good news in Fairfield County is usually local people deciding, on purpose, to help. Related coverage of Ohioans doing the same includes Ohio University Zanesville’s blanket drive for local families and Fremont neighbors raising funds to replant memorial trees for veterans.
What happens next is the presentation itself: the donations are being presented during the Team Gives Day celebrations, putting the checks directly in the hands of the two organizations. Fairfield County residents who want to add their own support can reach the Fairfield Area Humane Society through its site for adoptions, memberships and its wellness clinic.
And for the Lancaster Meijer team, the day ends with a simple ledger that any community would be proud of: $5,000 toward young people in crisis, $5,000 toward animals waiting for homes, and a reminder that the biggest hearts in a store are usually the ones on the schedule.