Chile – For many years now, The Salvation Army has been planning income generation projects to help with its ongoing costs of providing service in Chile. This proved to be much more complicated that one would think as the first step required a change to Chilean laws. The existing laws under which The Salvation Army was incorporated were ‘all or nothing’ when it come to tax exemptions for charitable work. Any income generation ‘business’ would have resulted in all of our operations having to be taxed as businesses. The new law, which was actually lobbied for by the associations of Evangelical Churches in the country, and has to do with equal recognition of faiths. Up to that point, Chile’s Church Laws only pertained to the Catholic Church. The new Law allows for equal access to all denominations.
At the same time, the law allowed for churches to create separate ‘foundations’ through which to provide other types of services or for the purpose of income generation, without affecting the status of the Church itself. Once the law was passed, The Salvation Army had work to do to create new constating documents and literally become a new ‘entity’. It was only once all the legal documents were in place that we could dream and plan for our future resource generating foundation.
We, of course, sought out advice from the Enterprise Development Department at International Headquarters, and Lieut.-Colonels Dan and Helen Starrett visited us on a couple of occasions to provide guidance. Our plan includes at least three phases to start with. First of all, we opened the business of selling used clothing, etc., which we will import from other parts of the Army world. The second phase is to begin collecting donations within Chile to be sold, and finally, our vision includes other types of businesses which can contribute to our financial needs. These other businesses will include a Funeral Services Business (at the present time there is no evangelical funeral service in Chile).
Our territory was blessed to receive assistance from different parts of the Army world. The first container received was a donation from Canada of clothing – it was very good quality too! We also received equipment both for the store and for the warehouse, together with some clothing, from USA East, and a further container of clothes from USA Central. The USA East sent a team of officers to help train our staff: Lieut.-Colonels Tim and Lynda Raines and Captains Diaz; as well the East provided us with start-up financing, as did the Norway Territory. Canada has promised us a fork lift and bailer for the warehouse. Thank you very much – we could not have done this without such valuable help.
Our first store opened on September 29th, with a band ensemble, a crowd of onlookers and a Salvation Army mascot: “Escudito”. We were blessed to have on hand Lieut.-Colonels Dan and Helen Starrett of IHQ, and Carolina Soto, a local TV Star. We are now working on opening the second store, which will be in the city of Valparaiso, following which a third will be opened before the end of the year here in Santiago.
Article by Lt.-Col. Susan McMillan who is a Canadian officer serving in Santiago, Chile