4 minute read
20 Years of Employee Care at CFMT
Cal Turner Sr., the founder of Dollar General.
Photos courtesy of Dollar General
The most precious resource of a business, any business, is its employees.
Whether hunkered over a computer keyboard, swinging a pick ax, waiting on a customer at a restaurant or pushing a mop and broom, individual workers provide the labor in any labor force.
The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee has served workers and their employers through its employee care funds for more than 20 years.
The first such fund opened May 3, 2000, as Dollar General co-founder Cal Turner Sr. established the Turner Family Disaster Relief Fund, which offers one-time financial assistance to Dollar General employees recovering from a recent natural disaster.
At the same time Turner, to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Dollar General, established the Turner Family Scholarships at CFMT to benefit the company’s thousands of employees spread across 44 states and more than 4,300 stores at the time.
They would be two of Cal Turner Sr.’s last philanthropic acts.
He passed away on Nov. 20, 2000, in his hometown of Scottsville, Kentucky. He was 85.
The idea for the company came to him from the success of major department stores’ frequent ‘’Dollar Day’’ sales. So, in 1955, he and his father, J.L. Turner, converted a department store in Springfield, Kentucky, to the first Dollar General Store. No item cost more than $1.
“The best price point God ever made,” Cal was fond of saying.
The company eventually moved its headquarters to Goodlettsville, Tennessee, just outside of Nashville, where his son, Cal Turner Jr., led the company from 1977 until his retirement in 2003. Under Cal Jr.’s leadership, the company grew to more than 6,000 stores and $6 billion in sales.
Today Dollar General, now a publicly-traded company, is the country’s leading discount retailer with more than 17,000 stores in 46 states and over 143,000 employees.
Cal Turner Jr., in his 2018 autobiography “My Father’s Business,” recalled that his father worried that, in such a large organization, management risked losing touch with life in the stores. He lived just a block away from a store in Scottsville, after all, and would often stop by to check on his managers and to shake the hands and thank each and every customer.
The elder Turner, lauded as a retail genius of the 20th Century, recognized, his son related:
Cal Turner Sr. (left) walks with son Cal Turner Jr., his successor as president and CEO of Dollar General.
For businesses and companies big and small, employee care funds allow compassionate employers to support their valued workforce with a tax-deductible solution that can provide emergency assistance to employees when they need it most.
The administrative burden is handled by The Community Foundation by taking care of the entire application process, from accepting, reviewing, and verifying applications. Once applications are approved, financial assistance for employees is provided through payments to vendors.
Employees covered by CFMT’s 80 or so employee care funds qualify to receive help in one of four ways:
• Natural disaster. This includes a situation such as a flood, hurricane, tornado, wildfire, severe storms or earthquake, which has damaged or destroyed a primary residence.
• Life-threatening illness or injury. This includes the employee, spouse and eligible dependent(s). Employees do not automatically qualify for assistance when they, or their dependents, are diagnosed, and assistance from a Fund cannot be a substitute for medical insurance. Applicants must demonstrate resulting financial need, including an inability to pay basic living expenses.
• Death. This includes both death of the employee or of eligible dependent(s). A fund cannot pay for travel to funerals or other funeral expense, but can help when the loss of income or the cost of funeral expenses or medical bills prevent an employee or the employee’s family from affording basic living expenses.
• Other catastrophic or extreme circumstances. These may be but are not limited to: house fire; major home damage that an employee could not avoid or prevent; serious crime against an employee such as robbery, arson, assault, domestic abuse; or another reportable crime that impacts the ability to afford basic living expenses.
As Middle Tennesseans are well aware, 2020 was an unforgiving year, from early March tornadoes to an ongoing worldwide COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, capped by a downtown bombing on Christmas morning.
The tale of 2020 can be told through CFMT’s employee care and disaster response applications and grants.
Our employee care funds awarded more than $7.4 million in grants from nearly 7,700 applications from across the country.
COVID-19 prompted the lion’s share of these applications — more than 5,900 of them — followed by natural disasters at more than 800 applications, from Middle Tennessee’s tornadoes to flooding in Mississippi and Louisiana, and an ice storm in Texas and Oklahoma.
As you’d expect, the biggest volume occurred in April 2020, with more than 2,000 applicants, as the pandemic began to spike.
Three full-time CFMT staffers spend much of their workdays on their computers and telephones patiently leading applicants through the process.
Meanwhile, the frequency of calls from businesses and corporations inquiring about establishing an employee care fund has almost tripled in the past year or so.
Corporations, small and large, are concerned about their No. 1 asset, and that is always their employees.
If you are interested in learning more about Employee Care Funds or Corporate Charitable Funds, please contact Belinda Dinwiddie Havron at 615-321-4939.
