Dew-ing their part for community

Dewey’s doesn’t offer delivery for pizzas, but non-profits can call and order volunteers and donation drives thanks to their non-profit initiative.

Dewey’s non-profit, DewMore, started in early 2009 as an effort by employees and managers to give back to the community.

“Dewey’s isn’t a business that spends its profits on advertisements or PR,” says Melanie Pugh, coordinator of the Greater Cincinnati branch of DewMore, “Our business has come from word-of-mouth referrals, so we try to give back to the community that has given us so much.”

Pugh, who runs DewMore for eight stores in the region, started as the DewMore rep for the Crestview Hills store and in March of 2010 she started running the program for the region. Pugh, who has a love of volunteering and community work, had already expressed interest in playing a bigger role in the program. As coordinator, Pugh and her team of cooks, servers and dishwashers strive to create or attend one volunteer or fundraising event a month.

“Sometimes we’ll contact, or one of our employees will know about, a non-profit that needs volunteers,” Pugh says.  “Other times we create entire events ourselves to benefit a specific cause.”

Most of the time, those causes are close to an employee’s heart. For example, November is Diabetes Awareness Month, and in May, the staff of Dewey’s lost a member due to complications of diabetes. So, in November, DewMore hosts a diabetes walk at Great American Ball Park. Since the employee being honored also created the Dr. Dre pizza, a chicken, bacon and ranch pizza with peppers, onions and jalapenos, the company also donates a percentage of that particular pizza’s sales to support diabetes research.

Other events, including a kickball league with a team from each store, benefit causes like Autism Speaks. An employee who already volunteered for the non-profit suggested that the annual league benefit the cause. Each team member paid a $30 fee to play, and the kickball league raised more than $1,600 for Autism Speaks.

“Now that we have DewMore, it gives us a chance to give back the community and get our name out there in a positive way,” Pugh says. “We would much rather be helping out a worthy cause than putting our logo on a billboard.”

Do Good:

Eat: A Dr. Dre pizza in the month of November and help further diabetes research
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Contact: Melanie Pugh if you have an event where you could use volunteers.

By Evan Wallis
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