Meijer honors Midwest volunteers fighting hunger with new award

Meijer honored 18 community volunteers across the Midwest with its new Hunger Relief Hero Award on May 26, backing each winner with a $500 Meijer gift card, a commemorative plaque and a $5,000 donation to the nonprofit that nominated them. The company said it received nearly 400 nominations, a sign of how many people are doing the unglamorous work of keeping local hunger-relief systems moving.

“We received nearly 400 nominations,” said Vik Srinivasan, Meijer’s chief administrative officer. The scale matters for groups like A Simple Gesture, where volunteer success depends less on one-time enthusiasm than on reliable repetition: route coverage, pantry deliveries, donor outreach and the steady habit of showing up when a green bag is on a doorstep and needs to be picked up.

Meijer framed the award as part recognition, part retention tool. In food recovery, volunteers often work behind the scenes, coordinating pickups, sorting donations and making sure food gets from neighborhoods to partner pantries before it spoils. Those jobs can be easy to overlook until a route goes uncovered or a pantry is short on stock. Public recognition, especially when it comes with a tangible reward and a donation to the nominating organization, gives that work a visible status that many volunteer programs struggle to create.

The award also sits inside a much larger hunger-relief footprint. Meijer said its year-round Simply Give program has supported local food pantries since November 2008 and has generated more than $100 million. The company said it partners with more than 500 food banks and pantries across the Midwest, giving the recognition program a direct line to the distribution network that makes volunteer labor matter.

For A Simple Gesture, which started in 2011 in Paradise, California, and established A Simple Gesture-Guilford County as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2015, the message is practical. The organization says its Green Bag Food Donor program collects recurring household donations from donors’ doorsteps and delivers them to partner pantries. It also runs a Food Recovery program and SHARE school refrigerators, with the Guilford County chapter working with dozens of local food pantries and the model now replicated by more than 70 chapters nationwide. In that kind of system, recognition is not a sideshow. It is part of how organizations keep volunteers returning, routes covered and pantry shelves stocked.