BLACKFOOT — The Salvation Army and Southeastern Idaho Community Action Agency, partners in helping those in need, held their annual Red Kettle Campaign Kickoff for the 2022 donation season Tuesday.

Organizers with the Salvation Army and SEICAA stood together in front of the SEICAA office in Blackfoot to announce the new donation season.

“It’s very significant because it helps to give awareness to the community in order to allow them to know the needs of the community,” said John Birks, captain of the Salvation Army in Idaho Falls. “There’s people that are in desperate need.”

The Salvation Army is looking for more volunteers to give their time and ring the bells to raise money for its humanitarian efforts. Volunteers ring the bells from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.

“In all of the counties across Idaho, there’s just never enough volunteers to fill all those days,” said Traci Hebdon, SEICAA’s Bingham County coordinator. “They keep the kettles operating every day of the week, besides Sundays. We don’t have the kettles operating during that time, but that’s a lot of hours to fill.

“There’s plenty of opportunity out there for people to do it on the weekends or after work. For those retired, I take my grandkids and we volunteer to ring bells as a family tradition. And that’s really fun for the kids. They ask me every year, ‘when are we going to do it, Grandma?’ So that’s really fun for us,” Hebdon said.

Blackfoot Mayor Marc Carroll has been volunteering to ring the bells for about four years and when his grandchildren were younger they would come with him.

“People just seem to get a smile on their face when they see the red kettle with somebody standing out there, sometimes in the very cold weather, ringing that bell,” Carroll said. “Sometimes you get a handful of change and sometimes (more). I had one guy who put in a $50 bill.”

Carroll said the man who donated the $50 bill said that he was pleased to do it because of the years his family had to rely on the Salvation Army.

The Salvation Army’s efforts vary across different areas, but they broadly include rent and utility assistance, transportation and food. Birks said that most of its locations will have a food pantry of some sort

Birks said it “really depends upon the community that the Salvation Army serves to find out the needs of the community and then doing our best with the funds that we have to help support that community.”

In Bingham County, the funds collected stay in the county.

“We take a lot of pride in the fact that we do so well in our county and that we’re so supported by our community, and that’s because of the Salvation Army’s reputation, SEICAA’s reputation,” Hebdon said.

Hebdon said the people who receive that aid are income qualified, “So you can be sure that it’s people that really are in need of help.”

In Blackfoot there are six different kettles at five locations. The locations are Walmart, Ridley’s, Kesler’s, CAL Ranch and Walgreens.

Hebdon also pointed out that with many charities people who donate don’t know how much is actually going to people in need, and she said the Salvation Army only retains 10 percent, so 90 cents of every dollar goes out. She said the money that stays goes to salaries and administrative fees needed to run the group.

“I take a lot of pride in that because a lot of people don’t know how much of each dollar they donate goes to actually helping, and that’s a pretty high amount — 90 percent not for profit,” Hebdon said.

In Bingham County last year, the Red Kettle campaign raised $19,600 of its $20,000 per season goal, and even in 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic, she said they came very close to hitting that goal.

If people are interested in volunteering their time to help the Salvation Army reach its donation goals, people can go to signup.com/go/iQZjwax or call SEICCA at 208-785-1583.

Paul Bingham, a volunteer with the Salvation Army, spoke to the group and talked about his experience with the organization. Around eight or nine years ago he said that he was feeling like he needed to do something for the community.

“I was involved in my faith,” Bingham said, “but I wasn’t really involved in too many other things.”

One day when he came home from work he turned on the television to relax and watched what he described as a cheesy Hallmark Christmas special, about a man with anger issues who’s ordered by a judge to ring bells for the Salvation Army. Over the course of the film, the man sees how much they help people in need.

The next day, their house got a newspaper that had an advertisement for the Salvation Army. What was odd was that their house didn’t normally get the paper. He went to ring the bells, and he found that often there wouldn’t be a replacement to come after him.

At the end of the donation season, he asked if there was something he could do to help raise the amount of volunteers, then the next year he helped them get a website where people can sign up as well as approaching churches and businesses to ask if they could help with volunteering and the kettle donations went up by around $15,000.

“It just touches my heart every time I see people willing to talk and donate,” Bingham said. “Then you see those little kids and they put in their pennies. They’re building a tradition. The parents are building a tradition for those kids.”