The shoes made her faster.
At least that’s what one little girl believed when she walked out of The Salvation Army’s Shoe In event wearing her brand new pair.
Rebecca Mayberry, Director of Development for The Salvation Army of San Antonio, remembers watching her leave. The girl was so excited about her new shoes that she wore them out of the building, along with the school supplies she had received that day. She was sure she could jump higher and run faster now.
Maybe she could.
The Shoe In program provided shoes, school supplies and hygiene products to 2,004 school aged children. That number tells you how big the program is. The little girl tells you why it matters.
And she is one very small piece of what The Salvation Army is doing in San Antonio.
Most of us probably know the organization from Christmas. We know the red kettles and the bells outside the stores we visit during the holidays. We know Angel Tree. Even if we have never needed one of its programs, we recognize the uniform.
What happens after Christmas is less visible.
The Salvation Army has been serving San Antonio for nearly 140 years. Today, its local work includes emergency shelters for women, men and families, a youth center, food assistance and programs supporting veterans and seniors.
At any given time, around 50 children are living in its shelters.
That number stopped me.
These are children who, Mayberry says, would otherwise have nowhere else to go.
It also points to something she wishes more people understood about the people who ask The Salvation Army for help. The assumption is often that its services are primarily for people experiencing chronic homelessness. That simply isn’t who everyone walking through the door is.
Some are families dealing with a temporary crisis. Veterans come for rental or utility assistance that can help them remain housed. Seniors living on fixed incomes are increasingly relying on food assistance because inflation has outpaced what they have coming in each month.
That means a lot of the work happens before someone loses everything.
A utility payment may not sound dramatic, but it can keep the lights on while a veteran gets through a difficult month. Food assistance can take one expense off the plate for a senior whose budget no longer stretches far enough. Affordable child care can give a parent somewhere safe for their child to be while they work.
The Peacock Youth Center is part of that picture. It provides affordable after school care where children receive academic, spiritual and emotional support. When school is out for the summer, the center offers care for school aged children with sports, arts, team building and leadership activities.
None of that has much to do with a bell.
Neither do 49,728 nights of shelter.
That is the number of nights provided through the Pathway of Hope shelters. The veteran program has provided hundreds of veterans with rental and utility assistance. Angel Tree provides Christmas gifts and basic necessities to 6,000 children and seniors. During a local disaster response, The Salvation Army can provide 1,500 meals a day. Its food pantry hands out sack lunches, food boxes and emergency food bags throughout the year.
The numbers are enormous, and honestly, 49,728 nights of shelter is difficult to picture.
A single night is easier.
It is knowing where your children are going to sleep before you put them to bed.
And that is where the red kettle comes back in.
Money donated to the Red Kettle campaign in our area stays here, supporting programs in Bexar and Comal Counties. The campaign is The Salvation Army’s largest fundraiser of the year, which means those few weeks of very visible fundraising help pay for work most of us will never see happening during the other months.
The bell may be seasonal. The need it funds isn’t.
It’s also worth knowing that the people receiving that help aren’t some abstract group living somewhere else. They live here.
A family can be doing fine until suddenly they aren’t. Maybe rent goes up. Maybe hours at work go down. The grocery bill that was manageable a year ago stops being manageable. A car repair lands in the same month as an unexpected medical bill. Rebecca’s answers made me think about how little distance there can be between having enough and needing somebody to help you get through a month.
That’s why the quieter parts of this work matter so much.
Keeping someone housed isn’t as visible as moving them into a shelter after they have lost their home. Helping with groceries isn’t a grand gesture. After school care probably isn’t what most of us picture when we think about charitable giving.
But if you are the person who needs one of those things, it can change everything about that week.
And there is something reassuring about knowing those resources exist before you ever need them. Most people don’t plan to need a food pantry, rental assistance or an emergency shelter. You don’t put “temporary financial crisis” on the family calendar. Life just happens, sometimes quickly and sometimes expensively.
That may be one of the most important reasons to support organizations like this while things are going well in our own lives. We are helping build the kind of community we would want waiting for us, our parents, our children or someone we love if life ever looked very different than it does today.
The good news for anyone reading this and wondering what they can actually do is that writing a check isn’t the only answer.
Volunteers prepare meals, sort donations, work in shelters and food pantries and support youth programs. During the holidays, volunteers are needed for both the Red Kettle campaign and Angel Tree. People with specific professional skills can also help through tutoring, mentorship, counseling and operational support.
There are easy ways to make it a family project, too. Organize a food, hygiene or school supply drive. Choose an Angel Tree tag and let your children help shop for another child. Volunteer together. Put something in the kettle and tell them where that money is going.
Schools and businesses can organize drives or volunteer as groups as well.
There was one more thing in Mayberry’s answers that I didn’t know.
All Salvation Army officers are ordained pastors.
In addition to running programs and overseeing operations, they provide spiritual guidance, counseling and support to the people they serve. For the organization, meeting someone’s immediate physical need is only part of caring for the person who came through the door.
Mayberry was asked to complete one sentence for this story: People think The Salvation Army is ________, but what I wish they knew is ________.
Her first answer was “a Christmas organization or holiday charity.”
I think a lot of us would have filled in that blank the same way.
But the second half is everything we don’t see.
The shelters for women, men and families. The 50 children who may be sleeping there tonight. The veteran who needs enough help to remain in his home. The senior picking up food. The parent dropping a child at the Peacock Youth Center. The 2,004 kids who started school with new shoes and supplies.
Christmas will come and go. The kettles will eventually disappear from the front of the stores and we’ll stop hearing the bells.
The shelters will still be open.
So when you hear that bell this year, give the dollar if you can. Grab an Angel Tree tag. Volunteer for an afternoon. Let your kids be part of it.
It doesn’t have to be enormous to matter.
We already know that.
There’s a little girl somewhere in San Antonio who got a pair of shoes and walked out believing she could run faster.
I’m not going to be the one to tell her she couldn’t!
The bell may be seasonal. The need it funds isn’t. Those few weeks of giving help fund work happening here all year long.