This season's kettle bell fundraising has been going slow and the Salvation Army of Logan needs more volunteers. The ringing bells downtown and at the Fountain Place Plaza are among the Salvation Army's biggest fundraisers and with economic downturns faced by many more people than usual the kettle drive is more important than ever. Donations have been slow in coming in this holiday season and more volunteers are needed to ring the bells.
Traditionally civic groups, church clubs and other organizations volunteer to ring bells to help the Salvation Army, but you don't have to be a Kiwanian or Rotarian to do that.
Anybody with time on their hands and a desire to help their fellow man can volunteer to ring the bells either downtown or at the front entrance of Walmart.
Earlier in the year the local branch of the SA was hit hard by draconian gas price increases like everybody else and they saw more people coming in for help who ordinarily would be making it on their own due except for gas gouging which hit working families hard.
"Around 71 percent of the clients are new people who were not in before," Captain Rob Barber said recently, noting that earlier this year many families had to decide whether to spend their limited funds on gas to go to work or food. "So our Food Pantry is being utilized more heavily than before," he said.
Barber noted that even when the SA's fundraising amounts were coming in the same as last year that it was not been enough this past summer to help meet the increased needs.
"We had had to cut back on helping people with utility bills this summer," he said, noting 2008 was a rough summer and many people needed help with power bills.
Captain Rob Barber said the organization also needs volunteers who can help people understand how to make and live on a budget.
Barber said it can be easy for ordinary people to get in over their head with debt in the modern credit-card obsessed world. Barber said it took him years to get out of debt himself.
"We are doing our best to help people get into job retraining programs," he said. "But we need help, and when I say that, I don't just mean donations. I mean we need volunteers to come in a couple of hours a week and show people how to make out a budget and stick to it, and how to balance their checkbook. We need people to help us teach others how to manage money."
Many people on public assistance have problems managing their money and wind up using churches and charities to make ends meet, he noted.
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