Salvation Army, businesses team up to provide Christmas gifts for children

Businesses around Jacksonville are giving locals the chance to be a Christmas angel to a needy child. And this year, some are making giving even more convenient with opportunities to participate online.
The Salvation Army of Jacksonville coordinates the program each year, accepting applications from underprivileged families in Jones County (another organization has a similar program for Onslow County) beginning in November. After verifying income statements and identities in the household to guard against fraud, they ask families to make a wish list: two wants and two needs per child. And then that wishlist becomes a little paper angel, containing the child’s story, name, and age, that will go out to a location in the community and wait for a sponsor.
Salvation Army Captain JoAnn Muré, who directs the Angel Tree effort, said that 10 local organizations chose to participate this year, including Camp Lejeune’s Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command (MarSOC), which adopted 100 angels; J.C. Penney in the Jacksonville Mall; and The Daily News.
And J.C. Penney and The Daily News have also set up ways to give remotely for people who want to get involved, but might not be able to go out and shop for a child. For The Daily News, that option is available through a portal called “All I Want for Christmas,” where visitors can click here and view a child’s profile and wish list, and then donate in $5 increments to support one child, part of a list or a whole family, if they choose.
 “We’re really excited about the online situation,” Muré said. “We feel like people are really moving towards that, where they do a lot of their shopping online.”
Muré said Salvation Army volunteers will do the shopping for any children who are supported with cash donations.
Terri Cone, the director of marketing at the Daily News and an organizer of “All I Want for Christmas,” came up with the idea of having an online donation portal on the Web site.
“Associates in the past, we all have adopted a child in different departments,” Cone said. “This way we feel we can help a lot more children.”
There are currently about 180 profiles on the site, corresponding to some of the 300 total angels dispersed around Jacksonville. And Carolyn Alford, Daily News columnist and director of Newspapers in Education, said the response was nearly instantaneous, with three sponsors the first day the portal went live.
To date, Muré said, supporters have donated toward five children on the site, meeting up to 60 percent of the $100 budget per child.
“We just want to light up a lot of small faces on Christmas day,” Alford said.
And Cone said that, even though the effort was Web-based, the paper would welcome anyone who wanted to bring toys or other items for a child to the newspaper office.
Muré said that the Angel Tree effort would end on Dec. 21, when they will bring all gift items to the Trenton Civic Center to be wrapped and packaged, ready to be picked up by families on the 22nd. She said that people purchasing physical gifts should bring the items unwrapped back to the Salvation Army or to the location where they got their angel.
And in addition to boxes of Christmas presents, the Salvation Army will give a box of holiday food, complete with a chicken or a turkey, to each Angel Tree family.
Muré said that people should know that their contributions for a child make a significant difference.
“It’s interesting that some of the needs have been blankets, have been underclothes, socks — things that we take for granted that we have,” Mure said. “Everyone can help in a small way. Whatever they can do will be very much appreciated.”