Thunder Bay Christmas charities confident

Christmas is fast approaching, but Thunder Bay's Christmas charities are confident they'll be hitting their holiday goals.

"The city has been warm-hearted as usual," said Percy Sutton, a Christmas Cheer board member. "It's a great thing, to give back."

As Sutton spoke Sunday at the Coliseum building at the CLE grounds, volunteers were going through tables of food donations. Sutton said the food being organized Sunday was all from the weekend's Stuff the Bus campaign, which brought in about $85,000 in food donations, and another $11,000 in cash donations.

Christmas Cheer is filling about 1,500 hampers for families this year.

'Always a need'

"We're up this year again, by a couple of hundred," Sutton said. "There's always a need."

The Regional Food Distribution Association has also been seeing seasonal success.

"It's going well," said Brendan Carlin, RFDA community services manager.

He cited Friday's Sounds of the Season event — a partnership between CBC Thunder Bay, the RFDA and Wasaya — as one example. The event saw 10,000 pounds of donated food delivered to Sandy Lake First Nation.

In addition, the RFDA ran its Stuff a Cruiser event on the weekend in partnership with Thunder Bay Police. That resulted in five and a half tonnes of food being donated to the RFDA.

And that's not all — the RFDA is also running its own Christmas hamper program for singles and seniors this year, as the Christmas Cheer campaign is geared at families.

"The hamper program is all ready to go," Carlin said, adding about 1,000 hampers will be distributed this week. "Thunder Bay is very generous, and we're getting very lucky this year."

"The response is always good for us," he said. "People in Thunder Bay who know about us seem to like us quite a bit."

Kettle campaign slower than usual

The one exception so far has been the Salvation Army, which reported last week that this year's Christmas kettle campaign was slower than usual.

"As of Wednesday . . . we were tracking about $7,000 behind where we were last year," said Major Lori Mitchell, executive director of Thunder Bay's Salvation Army branch.

The goal for this year's Christmas kettle campaign is $190,000, and the funds will go to supporting community and family services work, including the Salvation Army soup van, breakfast programs, and food bank, Mitchell said.

"We get a little bit of government funding for some of our community and family services work, but mostly that work, for the whole year, is supported by the kettle campaign, so it's critical money," Mitchell said. "We're confident we're going to meet our goal."

The Christmas kettle campaign runs until Christmas eve.