(Radio Iowa) – The red kettles are out for the annual holiday giving campaign for the Salvation Army. Spokesperson Tamyra Harrison says the Des Moines Salvation Army says they have volunteers out ringing bells across central Iowa. “We keep ringing that bell all the way through Christmas Eve. So we need a lot more bell ringers out there doing that. And we’re really hoping to raise quite a bit more money between now and Christmas Eve. Our goal is one-point-two million,” Harrison says. Harrison says she hears the same thing about the need for more volunteers from her colleagues across the state.

“I never hear anybody say, ‘Oh, we’ve got plenty. Could you go over to this corps?’ It just doesn’t happen,” she says. “I wish it did. I wish that was a problem that we had to deal with. But it’s not.” She says some areas do better than others at filling all their shifts of volunteers needed at the kettles. ” The size of the area can certainly depend on, you know, how many are filled. But you know, like with here in the central Iowa area that we cover, we’ve got 58 different kettle locations, six days a week, and, you know, 10 hours a day. That’s a lot of shifts to fill in. And last year, we only filled 38 percent of those shifts,” she says. You can go to registertoring.com (register to ring.com) and get signed up.

“If they do have all their bell ringer shifts filled, if you go to volunteer, there’s always some other way that you can help,” she says. “There’s always something you can do to help those in need, in the community that you know you can lend a helping hand to.” Harrison has done shifts ringing the bell and says  “I seem to think and feel when I’m out there that it’s the people that you would think might be struggling themselves that tend to give more, or that are more likely to stop and give because they’ve been there and they want to help somebody else, you know, they want to help the next person, or they understand what you know somebody’s going through,” she says.

Harrison says she hopes everyone will remember that any one of us is one disaster, one event, one something in our lives away from needing that extra hand ourselves  “You know, we may need that someday, and so being there for others in our community, our friends, our neighbors, You know our fellow Iowans, when they’re needing that help is just so important, and that’s who we are as Iowans. And you know, we need to, we need to do that,” Harrison says. Harrison says the Christmas campaign raises the funds to help the Salvation Army provide services to people across the state all through the year.