Our Lakewood team won the Kindness Rocks Award for the 2nd-straight year!
Kindness has been a staple at Lou Malnati’s dating back to when we first opened our doors in 1971. Lou and Jean established this Tradition of Generosity as a means of giving back to our people and our communities. In 2019, we introduced the Kindness Rocks Award as a way to recognize the store that best exemplified this tradition throughout an entire year. Fittingly, Lakewood was the home of our beloved team member, Meagan Sunde, who was the one who coined the term, “Kindness Rocks.” Now, her former store has brought the award home two years in a row. Here’s how they did it.
First, in order to qualify for the award, the store must have participated in all four areas of the program: volunteer events, cancer research fundraising, give back fundraisers, field marketing events.
Let’s just say Lakewood knocked this out of the park. They participated in six volunteer events with their own store, and six MORE volunteer events with their entire district. As a team, they volunteered at an animal shelter, hosted two American Red Cross Blood Drives in their party room, adopted a highway in their community and had their team clean up the highway on three separate occasions.
Incredible work in carrying out this tradition! Special recognition to the management team at Lakewood for making this happen:
- 2025 Regional Director Matt Stern
- District Manager Eva Andrews
- General Manager Dan Wesolowski
- Manager Nick Behrens
- Manager Sarah Nolen
- Manager Jeff Holtz
It wasn’t just Lakewood who stepped up to the plate this year, either. Our teams collectively put together and outstanding year of giving back. Here are some highlights –
- Our 17th annual Thanksgiving Food Basket Drive, where we came together alongside our families and friends to assemble 1,200 food baskets for under-resourced families to enjoy a holiday meal together. It was the most volunteers we’ve ever had at the event!
- Our annual Cancer Research Benefit raised more than $470,000 for cancer research and support groups – a record-breaking number! This was a full team effort, with our stores combining to raise over $55,000 through Cancer Donation Circles, Round Ups, and Dessert to Donate.
- Collectively, we hosted nearly 1,400 give back fundraisers in 2025!
- We broke another record with 24 Kindness Rocks team volunteer events!
We also continued our Malnati Match Program, which supports team members doing times of hardship, as well as our College Scholarship Program, which has helped support the education of 64 team members since its inception 13 years ago.
It’s amazing to see our teams truly living out our Tradition of Generosity. Thank you to everyone who helped make 2025 an incredible year of giving back.
Congratulations again to Lakewood on their second-straight recognition! Thank you for leading the way in helping better the lives of so many people who you supported through your efforts.
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