Salvation Army Kettle Campaign a huge success after call for volunteers comes through

The Salvation Army's 2025 Christmas Kettle Campaign was a huge success due to a last-minute push for donations and volunteers. CTV's Brent Lale reports.

A last-minute push for volunteers to help with the Salvation Army’s Kettle Campaign has paid off.

“CTV was very helpful to us recently in doing a call out to people to help us out with our kettle campaign,” said Nancy Kerr, executive director of London’s Salvation Army. “We really needed volunteers and over 100 people responded to that call. At the time, we were quite low in our revenue towards our $650,000 goal.”

While they didn’t quite reach that mark, they did have their highest total in London and surpassed $600,000 for the first time since 2019.

“We are sitting at almost $613,000 that has come in and there’s still people calling us now, wanting to donate so it’s fantastic,” added Kerr.

This year’s campaign brought in 4,000 toys, which allowed them to support 3,000 households. Approximately 5,200 children received toys through the 2025 program.

“I talked to some of the parents, and they just said, ‘Without this, I maybe would have had to go without meals myself’ or ‘I don’t know how I would have had Christmas with my kids if it wasn’t for the efforts of the Salvation Army,’” she said.

In total approximately 1,350 people volunteered, and others signed up who will be on the list to help in 2026. Their effort helped raise that massive financial total.

“It offsets the cost of the Christmas Assistance Program, which we just had, and a significant portion of the money does go to that, but the rest of it goes to helping us help individuals throughout the year,” explained Kerr.

“For example, today, even I’m helping as a senior couple who are having a crisis, just bought them some groceries and having it sent to them. It’s the little things like that that make their day, and it is really important for us to be able to do things like this,” she added.

Kerr says the rest of the money goes toward other events like community dinners throughout the year, school lunches, and children’s programs.