Major Rob Vincent, stationed at The Salvation Army South Mississippi Recovery Center recalled the first Christmas after Katrina and the endeavor to provide Christmas aid to an entire state coastline.
Traditionally, with The Salvation Army, we have thousands of people sign up for Christmas relief. But this year we decided to take everyone who was entered into our system, because anyone who was a hurricane survivor was going to get Christmas if we could make it happen. At that point, we had well over 20,000 names from all four recovery areas, so we anticipated doing about 30,000 families for Christmas. How could we meet that need?
We couldn’t find facilities, so we sat down and divided the plan to do mass distribution for Christmas relief in a drive-through fashion. It’s the most unusual thing we’ve ever concocted, but it worked. We did the best that we could, or as we say in The Salvation Army, we did the most good!
We took each site and made it a drive-through. The family would come to a check point on an alphabetical basis. We did it over an eleven-day period; ten days for the actual distribution and one day for those areas that had to do a makeup.
We were trying to collect toys and bicycles. Several groups were trying to do that with us, and we were going to just fold that into the system. We would pre-bag the toys, and it would be random until the toys ran out. Each family would receive toys, a gift box, a food box, and a Winn-Dixie gift card to buy meat for a Christmas dinner. Then, each family would receive Walmart gift cards to buy gifts for their families.
On the 12th of December we actually started our distribution. It ran until the 23rd of December, except for Sunday. We went non-stop from 8:00 in the morning to 4:00 in the afternoon. We tied up traffic in all four communities for miles because you had to be in line. It was done alphabetically and geographically.
Once we started, we saw the volume, but we took care of everyone that we could. We assisted just under 19,000 families (57,731 individuals) for Christmas in 11 days. We spent about $4.3 million dollars. It’s the most money I’ve spent in one period.
But Christmas happened!
I felt that The Salvation Army did the best that it could, considering the challenges of traffic and the volume of people. Our people worked tirelessly. We had an army of volunteers out there every day. They processed as many as they physically could. There was no time that we had a slump. It was constant throughout the day for those 11 days.
