Salvation Army Angel Tree Distribution
WDEF News 12’s Photographer Harrison Pirtle gives us the sights and sounds of this Merry Christmas.
Kimberly George with the Salvation Army say, "As you can see is a well oiled process. We have dozens of volunteers to help out and from the moment someone comes in to pick up their gift they are given their number that correlates with their family number that was on their application, same number that was on the Angel tree with their paper Angel and that’s how we coordinate the gift with each family. Our volunteers get that number on the card and the recipient gets the card. They go around the warehouse in their car and they put the card in dashboard so that we can see just like a regular pickup from after school care and then the runner, a volunteer, goes to their box their family assigned box and gets all of their gift and puts that in a buggy and they meet them out there and match up the card. So it’s a great way to have a check and balance and and efficient way."
Soldier Jarrod Andrews says, "I’m home for 28 days on leave getting ready to deploy to Korea and Syria again. I come home, to help my parents with all of this. They do a bunch of this every year, giving back and whatnot so I can do is help them out in the best way I can. I always had a nice Christmas growing up and to be able to be in a position to give back to other kids that are less fortunate, in my opinion it is an honor to be able to do that. I just like to see the joy on a kids face their face just lights up like I get Christmas this year. To me that’s the biggest joy of it."
George says, "I don’t think we can say thank you enough to Chattanooga and Cleveland and surrounding areas. 4525 Angels is a lot of folks to adopt and all of them were adopted, all of them are getting there gets this week. It’s been very busy but very rewarding."
The Salvation Army continues to collect donations through its Red Kettle campaign.
Officials say that fundraiser provides 70-percent of the organization’s annual income.
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