Saline Meijer to double-match donations to Saline Area Social Service Sept. 7

Saline residents can support others in the community who may be struggling financially by stopping at the Meijer store on Ann Arbor-Saline Road on Friday, Sept. 7 and participating in the company’s Simply Give hunger relief program.

Through the program, shoppers can pick up a Simply Give card in $10 increments and scan it at checkout. Each Meijer location chooses the food bank or nonprofit they want to support, and the Saline Meijer has chosen Saline Area Social Service as the recipient through Sept. 15. During each Simply Give campaign, Meijer helps more than 240 food pantries across the Midwest.

Friday, Sept. 7 is a special day, when Meijer will double-match every donation, turning a customer’s donation of $10 into $30 or a $40 donation into $120. Saline Area Social Service is hoping that Saline residents will donate a total of $5,000 on Friday so that total donations, after the double-match, will equal $15,000.

Through the program, proceeds are converted into Meijer food-only gift card that SASS can use to stock its food pantry.

“If we raised $15,000, that would last us three or four months,” says SASS executive director Jamail Aikens. “The nice thing is that we have up to 24 months to spend the food cards, so we can stretch that out as long as we need to around the ebb and flow of our food drives.”

Aikens says that the nonprofit is grateful when area residents donate boxed and canned foods, but the Meijer gift cards allow the nonprofit to add fresh fruit and vegetables to the food pantry and generally provide more variety to clients.

In addition to its food pantry, SASS helps the Saline community in a variety of ways, from running a program where area residents “adopt” a family to give presents to at Christmas to a scholarship program that does away with financial barriers for children who want to participate in sports, music, or other organized after-school activities.

For more information and to see videos that explain in more detail how the Simply Give program works in Saline, visit the SASS Facebook page.

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