Volunteers at The Salvation Army in central Arkansas were hoping for a lot of last-minute Christmas shoppers this year.
The Salvation Army Central Arkansas Area Command started Wednesday about $32,000 shy of its red-kettle fundraising goal of $375,000. The annual campaign is the nonprofit's largest fundraiser, and volunteers and paid bell-ringers worked until the 6 p.m. close of the campaign on Christmas Eve to try to hit the goal.
If the group succeeded, this year's fundraising campaign would be the most successful in at least the past five years, said Kathy Barbeire, marketing and public relations coordinator for the command.
"This is a good year. We purposely set our goal higher than what we raised last year," Barbeire said in the afternoon. "We're up from where we were last year, and if we hit our goal it would be more than we had raised in a while."
In 2013, an ice storm and a shortened shopping season because of Thanksgiving falling later than usual contributed to low returns. The group came in a little more than $40,000 short of its $400,000 goal.
Barbeire said she hopes the uptick in giving this year signals a financial thaw for folks affected by a frozen economy over the past few years.
"My first year was the year the housing market crashed," she said. "But I was really lucky. I had found a job, and I kept it through the recession. I know a lot of people were really hurting ... it's possible that the economy improving could be a part of our numbers this year. I've been hearing a lot of positive things."
Some of those positive things come in the form of returned favors -- people who received Salvation Army food or gifts in previous years and are now donating or volunteering to help others.
Barbeire said one of her favorite conversations this season was with a woman who delivered a load of toys for the nonprofit's Angel Tree program.
The program matches sponsors with wish lists for children before Christmas. The children stay anonymous, and many of them never know that the charity helped.
The woman who dropped off the gifts told Barbeire that her children had been on the tree a few years earlier.
"She said she was going to school at the [University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences], and her kids were angels," Barbeire said. "She said she had graduated and was working at the Veterans Administration [hospital], and she just wanted to give back now that she could."
Other volunteers have shared similar stories with Barbeire and coordinators over the past few weeks.
But Barbeire said the Central Arkansas Area Command also has made efforts to put more money into the kettles, including shifting from paid bell-ringers to more volunteers. Commands around the state saw decreases in volunteers over the past few years, with some needing to hire paid bell-ringers to man 60 percent of their kettles.
Barbeire said the effort to bring in more volunteers is not aimed at saving on paychecks -- bell-ringer pay starts at $7.50 an hour.
"Volunteers net three times more than our paid bell-ringers do, so we try to push to get them," she said. "Paid workers aren't allowed to solicit. They can say 'Merry Christmas,' thank people and say 'God bless you.' But volunteers, if they see someone they know, they can get them to come over and put money in the kettle. They [can] sing Christmas carols, play instruments, bring their kids out in costumes or paint their faces ... and they do."
Leslie Willis, 61, a worship pastor at Parkway Place Baptist Church in Little Rock, is one of those volunteers who prides himself on engaging people as they walk by the kettle.
Willis said his routine started when he began volunteering about five years ago. His first shift fell on the coldest day of the year. He had two Salvation Army bells that he rang in rhythm to keep himself warm before he was struck with inspiration.
"I called the church and asked them to bring me the children's bells and the table. That gave me about eight notes, so I could play actual songs," Willis said. "I'm a musician, so everything has rhythm to me ... The next year I bought some orchestra bells at an estate sale, and that gave me some more notes to play."
The third year, Willis took his trombone, and his wife, Becky, helped him ring the bells. The fourth year, he asked three friends to join him as a trombone quartet playing Christmas music.
"I realized that some people pass by and drop money in, but when you're playing music, people stop and reach into their billfolds and give," he said. "It's about the need, about a way I can help provide for people that don't have the things that I have. I can give my time, do my talent and try to help.
"The other thing is, now I rarely pass by a kettle that I don't put something in, even if it's just the change in my pocket."
Metro on 12/25/2014