The American Red Cross is finding it’s harder to save lives as the national economic recession deepens.  Local chapters depend largely on donations and fund raisers to finance their daily operations but donations are fewer and farther between as more and more Americans are struggling to make ends meet at home.

An added burden on the cash-strapped Red Cross is the increasingly inventive ways Americans are trying to stay warm as winter storms knock out power lines and others look for less expensive, but not always safe, ways to stay warm while reducing heating expenses.  Of the approximately 71,000 localized disasters the Red Cross responds to each year, most of them are house fires.  Typically, the Red Cross provides food, clothing, rent money, and temporary housing to victims of house fires but, with several months to go before its fiscal year ends in June and more house fires than usual in many areas this year, the organization has had to ask Congress for $100 million to supplement its disaster relief program.

According to the Red Cross, one family’s house caught fire because the occupants were trying to heat the house with candles.  Portable space heaters are a common cause of house fires.  Some areas have been particularly hard hit by fire response duties but perhaps none so bad as Colorado Springs, Colorado, where they’ve battled their busiest fire season in the 97-year history of the local Red Cross chapter.

The 700+ local chapters throughout the nation are getting creative about stretching their dwindling funds, too.  Some are laying off workers, as was done recently at company headquarters.  Of the 3,000 employees staffing the organization’s headquarters in Washington, DC, almost one-third of them were laid off last year.

Other chapters are reducing their hours of operation, freezing salaries, converting full-time jobs to part-time jobs, canceling volunteer training and public education programs, and turning down the heat in the office.  Some of them are consolidating services with neighboring chapters but some of them are closing entirely.  The Twin Cities Minnesota chapter not only laid off many employees, it reduced the number of free rides to doctors’ appointments it’s been giving to the area’s elderly and poor.  The Greater Long Beach (California) chapter describes this year as its worst financial crisis for more than a decade.

Mandated by Congress first and foremost to fulfill two obligations – disaster response and emergency communications assistance to families in the military – the organization is facing a record number of house fires this year as Americans resort to desperate means to keep warm, even when money saved endangers lives and jeopardizes homes.  While most nonprofit and charitable organizations are struggling to work on restricted budgets due to fewer and smaller donations, none of them is required to perform by an act of law to the same extent as the Red Cross.

February marks the beginning of the organization’s annual fund-raising drive, with events scheduled throughout the country where local chapters are hoping to gain enough money to cover next year’s expenses and shore up already depleted budgets for the remainder of this fiscal year.

Mari Wright, executive director of the Southwest Georgia chapter, addressed the organization’s financing dilemma quite effectively when she said, “We cannot not be here.”