NEWS STORY: Salvation Army finds a shortage of volunteer bellringers

c. 1999 Religion News Service STUART, Fla. They are as much a part of the holiday season as Christmas lights and a shopping mall Santa Claus. When the Salvation Army bellringers arrive with their red collection kettles, you know Christmas can’t be far behind. But this year officials from the nation’s top-grossing charity are struggling […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

STUART, Fla. They are as much a part of the holiday season as Christmas lights and a shopping mall Santa Claus. When the Salvation Army bellringers arrive with their red collection kettles, you know Christmas can’t be far behind.

But this year officials from the nation’s top-grossing charity are struggling to find volunteers to man the kettles in some parts of the country. Without volunteers, the Salvation Army is forced to pay bellringers and more than half of the donated money never gets to the people who need it most.


“I have all my bases covered, but it’s not the way I want,” said Capt. Robert Reckline, the commanding officer at the St. Lucie County, Fla. corps. “I have to pay everyone.”

For years, volunteers stood outside shopping malls and department stores with a gentle smile and a steady ring. But this year Salvation Army officials along Florida’s Treasure Coast say those volunteers are nowhere to be found, and nearly half of the $30,000 to $50,000 they hope to collect will be spent on paychecks.

The annual bellringing campaign from Thanksgiving to Christmas is lucrative for the Salvation Army, an evangelical Protestant church that is best known for its charity work. Last year Salvation Army bellringers collected about $79 million in 20,000 kettles around the country.

Of the $1.2 billion collected last year by the Salvation Army, about 23 percent came through its ubiquitous thrift stores and 28 percent from direct mail solicitations. A full 84 percent of its donations went directly to service programs.

Theresa Whitefield, a spokeswoman for the Alexandria, Va.-based church, said whether local chapters pay bellringers or recruit volunteers depends on the area. While she doesn’t expect the lack of bellringers to be a national problem, she said the appeal is just getting started and it may be too early to tell.

“At this point it doesn’t appear to be a problem, but we are very early into the season right now,” Whitefield said.

Reckline and his counterpart in neighboring Martin County, Capt. Alan Phillips, are at a loss for why no one is volunteering to man the kettles this year. With Florida’s large retirement population, they said volunteers should not be hard to find.


“We need our kettle program to pick up the slack (from slow months) and when you have a bellringer making $6 an hour, you don’t make a profit until they collect a certain amount of money,” Phillips said. “It’s basic economics.”

What’s more, Phillips said holiday donations this year are down $10,000 from last year. In September and October, the driest months for the Army, Phillips said his office had to turn people away because of lack of funds.

Economics and bottom line aside, both Phillips and Reckline agree the bellringers employed by the Salvation Army need the jobs. The Army fills the jobs with people who come to the agency seeking assistance.

They are people like 19-year-old Erica Cirilo of Jensen Beach, Fla., who spends 12 hours a day, six days a week outside the Jensen Beach Publix with her kettle. This is Cirilo’s first year as a bellringer; she said the money helps care for her infant son.

“It’s fun,” she said recently, despite the monotony of the job and the occasional headache caused by the constant ting-a-ling. “You get to meet a lot of people.”

Bellringers in Martin County earn $6 an hour, while St. Lucie County bellringers take home $5.25.


The kettle campaigns are almost as old as the Army itself.

Salvationists arrived in New York from England in 1880 and the kettles debuted 11 years later at a San Francisco Christmas dinner for needy people.

Nickels, dimes and quarters fed 1,000 people that first year.

The kettles, in the Army’s well-planned strategy to provide “soup, soap and salvation” were a deliberate attempt to capitalize on the commercialization of the Christmas season. Kettles were placed outside department stores and the kettles were meant to evoke warm feelings of hearth and home.

“The humble kettle was a silent reminder of what the holiday was really about,” says Diane Winston, a Salvation Army historian, in her 1999 book on the Army, “Red-hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army.”

“Tossing in a few coins was an easy way to assuage an uneasy

conscience,” she wrote.

Salvation Army leaders hope seeing the lonely kettles at local shopping centers will similarly inspire people to volunteer.

“This whole thing started with people volunteering, and we’d like to get back to that,” said Patricia Hickey, the Army’s development director in Martin County.

Phillips said his office is hoping to model an all-volunteer kettle program in Ocala, Fla. next year, but that will mean recruiting and training volunteers in the spring, months before the kettles arrive.


“The people that we hire are people that need work and we’re helping them to have a Christmas by having a job,” Phillips said. “When you look at that angle, it’s a little more comforting. Still, I would rather have volunteers.”

DEA END ECKSTROM

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