As the Hill Country continually changes, there are slices of Kendall County that have retained their small-town sense of community, and the fire department fundraiser in Sisterdale earlier this month showed just that.
The halls of the Sisterdale Volunteer Fire Department were lined with chatting neighbors and residents ready to support the volunteers who show up day or night and rain or shine to extinguish fires big and small. The preserved sense of community could be seen by the Stehling family serving the plates of pork loin, who Sisterdale VFD Chief Brian Reilly said have been serving meals for decades.
“It’s funny because people congratulate me on our fundraiser, ‘Hey, yeah, great job on that fundraiser.’ I sort of laugh, but I make a point every time to tell people that the community is the one that really does that,” Reilly said. “The firefighters can take credit for a lot of things there, but the August fundraiser isn’t really one of them.
“The community is the one that gets together, they form a committee, they go out and they find donations for these raffle baskets and put all this stuff together. The Stehling family cooks all the meat at all of our fundraisers, and they have for decades.”
Beyond cooking and serving the food that helps feed to hundreds of people roaming the fire station that Saturday evening, the fundraiser relies heavily on the community support to even get off the ground. Reilly said it’s the pork loin donations from Klein Smokehaus, the local artisan donations for raffles, business donations for the basket raffles and many other community donations that allow the fundraiser to take place.
This overwhelming sense of support was evident not only by the hundreds of people who showed up that evening, but also by their willingness to bare through a hot summer day without air conditioning to gather with their community and support a vital service in the township.
This is sense of community and support is partially fostered because the Sisterdale VFD operates a little differently than many other fire departments around the county and state, relying on an old way of doing things where the community has the last say. Reilly said the local VFD board is not solely comprised of firefighters but residents in the community.
He said the community turns up to meetings and gets a say in how the VFD money is spent and resources are pulled, noting this holds the board and firefighters accountable because they have to be able to justify any expense to any member of the community regardless of their knowledge level on the topic.
While this democratic and community-drive system seems idyllic, Reilly admitted it takes work to maintain, but he said those in Sisterdale will hold onto this way of operating as long as they can.
“It’s not easy to maintain,” Reilly said. “It definitely takes some effort to try to keep pushing that, but it’s also I think part of the reason why people would move to some place like Sisterdale versus some of the more urban parts of the country where it’s the quaintness of the country, but they still expect to have something at the door in five minutes.
“We’ll hang onto it as long as we can.”
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