Jersey Mike’s Is Rounding Up for Disability Employment, Here’s Where Your Dollar Actually Goes

You walk into a Jersey Mike’s in October. The line smells like vinegar and fresh bread. The kid behind the counter asks if you want to round up. You say sure. Two dollars and forty-three cents becomes three dollars. You don’t think about it again.

That’s the whole design. That’s the trick of it.

Jersey Mike’s Subs runs a nationwide fundraising campaign every October. The beneficiary is Best Buddies International. The occasion is National Disability Employment Awareness Month. The mechanics are simple. Round up your purchase. Donate a dollar. Use the app. Use the website. The company sends 100% of those donations to Best Buddies. The donations are tax deductible. Third-party delivery orders don’t count, which is a small detail most people will never notice.

But the round-up is not the story. The round-up is the doorway. Behind it, something else is happening. Something slower. Something that doesn’t fit on a poster.

The Partnership

Best Buddies International was founded in 1989 by Anthony Kennedy Shriver. The mission is straightforward. One-to-one friendships. Integrated employment. Leadership development. Inclusive living for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, IDD, in the shorthand. Down syndrome. Autism. The kinds of diagnoses that used to get a person parked in a workshop and forgotten.

The organization has over 4,000 chapters worldwide. It serves more than 1.5 million people. Those are numbers on a page. The numbers matter to the grant writers and the board members. They don’t matter to the guy learning to wrap a sub at a Jersey Mike’s in Tulsa.

Jersey Mike’s started working with Best Buddies in 2023. Not a check-writing exercise. Not a photo op with a giant cardboard check. Actual infrastructure. Dedicated training. A candidate-matching process. Hiring practices built for people who need a different kind of ramp into the workforce.

Anthony Shriver said it plain. “Jersey Mike’s has been an incredible partner and true champion of the Best Buddies mission,” he said. “Together, we’ve opened doors to meaningful employment and given countless individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities the chance to thrive and make friends in the workplace”.

Make friends. That’s the part nobody puts in the press release headline. The employment is measurable. The friendship is not.

How the Campaign Works

October 1 to October 31. Participating locations across the country. You round up. Or you donate. In-store, in app, on the website. 100% goes to Best Buddies.

The app makes it frictionless. The cashier asks a scripted question. The register does the math. You don’t have to think about it.

Charlie Morrison, the CEO of Jersey Mike’s, framed it this way. “National Disability Employment Awareness Month is a time to recognize the value that people of all abilities bring to the workplace and our communities,” he said. “Giving back is a core value at Jersey Mike’s and we’re proud to continue our partnership with Best Buddies for another year and support its work to expand opportunities for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities”.

Giving back is a core value. That’s the kind of sentence that gets polished by three people before it leaves the building. But the results are harder to polish. In 2024, the campaign raised $4.3 million for Best Buddies. That’s a lot of round-ups. That’s a lot of two-dollar sandwiches becoming three-dollar sandwiches.

Employment in Practice

Here’s where the press release ends and the actual work begins.

The partnership isn’t about writing a check. It’s about building a pipeline. Jersey Mike’s and Best Buddies developed a “real infrastructure, dedicated training, a candidate-matching process and hiring practices,” the company said. That’s corporate language for something deeply human. Someone sits down with a store manager. Someone learns what tasks a particular candidate can handle. Someone trains the team. Someone adjusts the schedule. Someone learns patience.

The result is Best Buddies participants working in Jersey Mike’s stores across the country. Slicing meat. Toasting bread. Working the register. Doing the job. Getting a paycheck. Having a reason to get up.

The QSR Magazine coverage noted that each year the partnership has expanded its reach. More stores. More participants. More people who used to be invisible now wearing an apron and a name tag.

That’s the part that doesn’t fit on a poster. You can’t photograph the slow accumulation of confidence. You can’t put a dollar amount on a kid learning that he can, in fact, handle the lunch rush.

NDEAM Context

National Disability Employment Awareness Month happens every October. The U.S. Department of Labor runs it. The point is to recognize the contributions of workers with disabilities and to highlight the barriers that still exist.

The barriers are real. Unemployment rates for people with disabilities are consistently higher than for the general population. The reasons are not mysterious. Transportation. Accommodations. Assumptions made by hiring managers who have never had a conversation with a person with IDD.

Jersey Mike’s is not solving all of that. A sandwich chain is not a social services agency. But the company is doing something that most corporations talk about and few execute. It’s hiring. It’s training. It’s keeping people on the schedule.

The month is a frame. The campaign is a mechanism. The work is the work.

Four Years In

This is the fourth consecutive year. The partnership started in 2023 and has deepened each cycle. That’s not a marketing calendar decision. That’s a commitment that survives staff turnover and quarterly earnings calls.

The campaign has become part of the October rhythm at Jersey Mike’s. The round-up prompt is baked into the point-of-sale system. The app asks the question. The website has the donation button. It’s automatic now. That’s what institutionalization looks like. Not a press release. A checkbox on a screen that a million people click without thinking.

And that’s fine. The thinking can happen later. The dollar does its work whether the person who gave it was thinking or not.

The Quiet Part

Here’s the thing about corporate philanthropy. Most of it is noise. A logo on a banner. A CEO on a stage. A hashtag. The actual impact is hard to find and harder to measure.

This is different in one specific way. The money goes somewhere. The employment happens. The stores are real. The aprons are real. The paychecks are real.

You don’t have to care about any of that. You can round up and forget. You can skip the round-up and feel nothing. The campaign will continue. The partnership will deepen. The kid at the Tulsa Jersey Mike’s will learn to wrap a sub whether you gave your forty-three cents or not.

But if you’re the kind of person who wonders where things go, the dollar, the effort, the time, the answer is in the stores. Behind the counter. In the apron. In the name tag. In the slow, unglamorous work of giving someone a chance.

That’s not a slogan. That’s just what’s happening.