Print Helps Bring Community Together

For Kelly Mattingly, co-owner, Signarama San Antonio NW, Texas, the recent flooding disaster in Texas’s central Hill Country is more than just personal. While she didn’t have family at the summer camps where so many lost their lives, family friends did.

Scanning the QR code on the sign will take you directly to the donations page for the Community Foundation Texas Hill Country. | Credit: Signarama San Antonio NW

So far, there have been a confirmed 136 deaths after the devastating July 4 floods, with 108 of those in Kerr County, including 36 children, 27 of whom were at Camp Mystic, where the family friend was staying with other children for the summer.

And while the news reports have mostly moved on to other breaking stories, the cleanup and recovery effort there is just getting started in the impacted communities. So, Mattingly and her husband Matt — for whom Ingram, in Kerr County, is his hometown, and where his family still lives — started looking for a way they could help.

Mattingly notes that the communities didn’t need any more water or supplies — they simply didn’t have the space to take any more after the outpouring of support. What they really needed was cash donations to help with the recovery efforts, and so they can get the supplies the community needs as they need them, rather than warehousing. So the two created a sign with a QR code that pointed back to the community organization handling donations, and then started handing them out.

From there, it took off.

“We really just thought, like, okay, 200 signs. We’ll deliver 100 to Bernie, 100 to Kerrville. We'll give QR codes. The funds would go straight to Community Foundation Texas Hill Country, and we would just kind of do that,” says Mattingly. “Well, 200 signs turned into 500, that turned into 1,000 and we were just printing all day and night, with our own money. And it had quickly grown bigger than what we could keep up with, what our printers could keep up with. So, we posted on the Signarama Facebook page with all the owners asking for help. And that's when other owners —we’re at about 18 owners right now — stepped in and started printing signs and delivering H stakes and all the things. I think my husband said as of [the week of July 28] we're close to 6,000 signs.”

To date, there are 15 different pickup locations where residents can collect a sign to display their support for the victims of the flooding, and while there is no way to know how many of the donations came directly from the signs, so far the organization has collected roughly $60 million, Mattingly says.

“You have all these volunteers, and when the government help stops and everybody goes back to their daily lives, our biggest hope is these yard signs will be in people's yards a year from now. We're hoping, a year, two years from now, people still see these signs and remember what had happened, and that these people still need our help,” she says.

Credit: Signarama San Antonio NW

The outreach and demand for the signs has been purely word of mouth, with people seeing them in other’s yards, and calling wanting to know where they can get one of their own, spreading the support far beyond what Mattingly and her husband ever thought they would see when they printed those first signs.

And they don’t want people to forget those who will be dealing with the fallout for months, and even years, to come. She notes, “We just printed signs yesterday, and they just started the cleanup process and like, where to move all the trash, and the refrigerators, and all the things. My husband went out there yesterday, and they just have a very long road ahead of them for cleanup. I mean, there's still people missing. And really, just to … you know, as the months and years go on, just remember what had happened. It’s amazed us how the community from Bernie all the way to Kerrville has come together to support them and do whatever everybody needs to help. We're all small towns, so just to see the support has been amazing, and we're just going to need to see that continue as months and years go on.”

It’s a little bit of hope in a bleak situation, and a reminder that every little bit helps. For anyone interested in donating to the relief efforts, the QR code on the sign will take you directly to the website. And for those printers interested in helping to print signs, you can reach out directly to Signarama San Antonio NW at 210-476-5115.