Greenwood Kroger Team Helping Local Causes & Nonprofits
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A group of dedicated staff members at the Kroger grocery store on State Road 135 in Greenwood are working diligently to help benefit several local businesses and nonprofit organizations.
Allison DeVaney, who works as the wine and spirits steward in the adult beverage department at the Greenwood Kroger, serves as a member of the store’s Our Promise team. The group meets at the beginning of each year to assess which organizations and causes might benefit from some help through measures such as donations and care packages.
“We all put ideas on the table and figure out how we want to connect with the community,” says DeVaney, a retired teacher who began working for Kroger in 2016 and immediately joined the company’s Our Promise team.
The first project that DeVaney and her fellow Our Promise team members put together was a donation program to benefit Rosie’s Southside Animal Shelter. The team set up flyers and a large bin at the front of the store, and Kroger matched customer cat food donations up to $100 for the shelter, which operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
“Sometimes when we have store resets and things are taken out of the store, we mark products down, and there are customers that always stop in those sections first,” DeVaney says. “We did a complete pet reset, and we had all these things like cat litter, food and toys, and we could have marked them down but sometimes we get credit for donating those things. I thought it would be a great idea to partner with Rosie’s Shelter.”
The Greenwood Kroger Our Promise team also recently partnered with Erich Orrick, vice president of the WISH for OUR HEROES Indiana chapter, and helped put together care packages for active military members recently deployed to the Middle East.
The team set a large bin inside the store and stationed team members next to items throughout the store that were specifically requested for inclusion in the care packages. DeVaney says the response from shoppers was extremely positive, and the team is currently raising funds to help cover care package shipping costs.
“My son graduated from Center Grove last year and enlisted in the Army while he was a senior,” DeVaney says. “It’s hard because you can’t communicate with family during boot camp. When we would send letters in the mail it would improve our entire day, and knowing how good it felt to get letters and for my son to get letters, we started thinking about what we could do to pay that kind of feeling forward.”
DeVaney says all Kroger locations consist of internal Our Promise teams that help out with local causes specific to each Kroger location.
“We also do a lot of fundraising as an enterprise, for Riley and Komen and things like that,” DeVaney adds. “But then we can branch off and do other things like what we’re doing with our care packages. The Kroger community is pretty amazing, and I hope we can keep up what we’re doing with giving back through the Our Promise team.”
For more info, call 317-530-3086 or visit Kroger at 5961 North State Road 135 in Greenwood.
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