By OLIVIA BERGMEIER
Salina Post
In the year's first three months, 16 structure fires have impacted businesses and families across Salina — leading the Salina Salvation Army staff to work overtime to help 12 families in town.
The Salvation Army assists families and individuals through their Emergency Disaster Services program with food, housing, clothing, and other programs after an emergency like a house fire.
Still, the staff faces another challenge besides helping so many families in such a short period.
"With our Christmas Kettles, we fell about $20,000 behind," said Salina Salvation Army Lieutenant Luke Hursh. "Because we fell $20,000 behind, and now we're having more fires, it affects our ability to help them as much as we want."
Last year, the Salina Salvation Army helped six families after a fire, so they have already doubled that this year.
A team consisting of Hursh, his wife, Capt. Patricia Hursh and two other staff members assist families and first responders during emergencies.
With the increased need this year, Hursh said the small team has continued but with a new plan moving forward — recruiting volunteers to staff an Emergency Disaster Services Team.
"We're trying to put together an Emergency Disaster Services Team of people on call who can get the training," Hursh said.
Volunteers can join the team by contacting or visiting the Salina Salvation Army, where Hursh said staff will give them the basic training, but volunteers can choose to do further training if requested.
Those who join the team could also travel with the Salina Salvation Army if called to another major disaster in the United States or beyond.
Beyond adding more Emergency Disaster Services Team staff, the Salina Salvation Army partnered with The Unreal Tour for a benefit concert in April to help remedy some lost funds from the Christmas Kettles.
"The benefit concert is hopefully going to help us raise those $20,000 plus some," Hursh said. "It's going to be money to help the community. It all goes directly back to the program. A lot of people don't realize that 86 cents of $1 goes to help programs, so that 14 cents is used for administrative costs."
Salvation Army staff looked for ways to raise more cash for their programs, especially with a higher demand this year, and The Unreal Tour happened to contact the organization.
READ MORE: The Unreal Tour visits Salina in April for The Salvation Army of Salina benefit concert
Hursh said they contacted him and his staff, asking if they would like to host the concert in Salina. Hursh then inquired if it could be a benefit concert, to which they agreed.
The tour will feature Christian artists Sanctus Real, Unspoken and JJ Weeks at 7 p.m. on Friday, April 5, at Tony's Pizza Events Center, 800 The Midway, Salina, Kan.
"This is going to help us not just with our Emergency Disaster Services, but it will help us with our feeding program, our character building program and our youth music program," Hursh said. "It would help us possibly start other programs that we want to do."
Interested attendees can find tickets for the concert at Tony's Pizza Events Center box office or Ticketmaster.com. Ticket prices are $23, $33 and $45 for VIP, which includes a meet and greet with the artists.
Hursh said there are 800 regular tickets and 200 VIP tickets in total. On Monday, only 95 regular and 30 VIP tickets have sold for the concert.