Tag: community

The First

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The first poem in our series, available to watch on our Patreon!

It’s available free to everyone, and we plan to keep it that way, however we have started our Patreon with the belief that our supporters on the blog will be interested in supporting us as patrons as well.

This poetry series is the first of many new projects we have on the go. With your support of our Patreon campaign, we will be able to bring some exciting new work to you.

Lawtons Serves Its Communities

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To our Valued Lawtons Customer,

We have all experienced many changes in our lives in the past few weeks. The unfortunate reality is that these unpredictable changes are much harder on vulnerable members of our communities. At Lawtons and within our family of brands, we are doing everything we can to help our local communities.

More than just keeping our stores open to feed Canadians, our store teams have a pulse on the direct needs of their local community. And as always, they’re stepping up. They are donating food and supplies to local food banks. They are making home deliveries to those in isolation and to vulnerable members of our communities. With everything our stores are going through, they haven’t forgotten about their local communities, because that’s just who they are.

And that’s why today we are announcing our Community Action Fund, empowering our more than 1,500 grocery and pharmacy stores coast-to-coast to create localized solutions to help address their communities’ most urgent needs. Inspired by our stores and designed for them. Our stores know their communities best and this program will result in millions of dollars being immediately infused into local communities, in ways that are immediately meaningful.

We’re already seeing it happening. This past Thursday, our Stonebridge store in Saskatoon donated 2,000 paper bags to the Saskatoon Friendship Inn. With reduced hours and a transition to “take out only”, this community center has been working tirelessly to feed those at risk in Saskatoon. The Stoneridge Sobeys donation helped ensure the community centre could shift their operations from free meal service to take-out meals quickly. This donation helped provide safe meals to thousands of neighbours. A small example, but one that is having a big impact for those most in need in Saskatoon.

We are also working with food banks in urban areas to help alleviate the strain on their services by providing products, cash donations and gift cards. Daily, we are hearing from community support organizations about the increasing needs they are facing as more and more people reach out and ask for help. This investment will enable them to do even more to help their neighbours in need.

As we start putting our Community Action Fund into action, we also have to remember our teammates are continuing to provide essential services in-store. We’re empowering the most important leaders in our company – our store managers and franchisee partners – and know by putting this investment in their hands, we can truly make a difference where and when you need us most. This is the time for all of us to come together.

Sincerely,

Michael Medline
President & CEO

A (Not Really) Good-Bye

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Most Thursday mornings, I go over to my church. In my mind, I’m going to hang out with my minister and a couple of people who are generally in the office on Thursday mornings. For me, this is “my time!” It’s a couple hours each week where I can put all (or most) of my stress, my obligations and my worries aside and just be among friends. We talk, laugh, tease each other, etc. That’s how I look at it.

But last February, at our Annual General Meeting, our minister really surprised me. Usually at our AGM’s, people are thanked for this and that and various things they do and what not. So, as Mike was going through his list of thank you’s, honestly, I was half zoning out and it took me a few seconds to hear him say: “I also want to thank Gerianne.”

My first thought was: “What the hell is he thanking me for?” He went on to tell people “Gerianne comes over most Thursday mornings and is with us in the office. She contributes ideas, gives feedback and input, helps us plan things like bible studies, our 3D family worship evenings, and so on. So, I want to thank Gerianne for her valuable contributions.”

I sat there thinking: “Wow! And I thought I was just hanging out. He’s making it into a purpose thing – with intent and value. That’s friggin’ awesome.”

What I didn’t have the chance to directly tell Mike that evening is how much I really appreciated his thank you and comments. As I said, he saw a purpose to the time I take “for me.”  Mike saw the bigger picture and my contributing to the life of our church.

Still, of course, when it comes to Mike and my relationship, there always has to be a punch line. So he ended his remarks by mentioning that in one of our bible studies, he asked us to journal our reactions to what we were learning. His last comment was: “And for those of you who didn’t like the journaling, y’all can thank Gerianne for having to do that, ’cause that was her idea!”

Recently though, I’ve been accepted into Teamwork’s Self-Employment Program, and as fantastic as that news is and as much as I’m looking forward to learning incredible things, since the program’s classes are all day Tuesdays and Thursdays, it means for 4 months I won’t be able to hang with my amigos. I know we all say: “It’s only 4 months.” But sometimes the possibility exists that “it’ll never be quite the same.” New “inside” jokes and “you know” things will naturally take place, and that’s to be expected. Still, it was nice to get this message from Chelsey when I got home from my first Thursday “away”: She wrote: “Weird without you today!” These words tugged at my heart-strings for a bit. Everyone deep down wants to be wanted and hopes they’ll be missed. It’s just nice to know that I was missed this week.

Just a random end thought. One of the things I very much love about the Presbyterian denomination (going back as far as I can remember) all of the clergy go by their first names. There is Mike, Sydney, Nancy, Kenn, Gwen and so on. There does not seem to be an attitude of superiority. Not very often do I meet a clergy where they introduce themselves as: “I’m Rev. so and so.” There is very much the attitude of we’re all in this together. No one is greater or less than, which is really nice if you think about it.