Karl Speltz, Christmas Bureau volunteer, sits at the intake desk where clients with disabilities, and moms with small babies, begin the process of going through the bureau to receive toys and food vouchers.

Speltz is 69, retired from the military and a school administration career, and this is his fourth year as a Christmas Bureau volunteer. He understands the poverty issue in the Inland Northwest, but his conversations with clients do not focus on poverty.

Thursday, he talked with them about greenhouses and retirement and how he’s not very good at guessing babies’ ages. The clients told him about their dogs, their views on the weather and how they hope someday to volunteer at the bureau, too.

The Christmas Bureau is sponsored by The Spokesman-Review in partnership with Catholic Charities, Salvation Army and Volunteers of America. This year’s goal is $485,000 – a lot of money.

Every year, those involved in the Christmas Bureau discuss whether this is the best use of nearly a half-million dollars. They know what agencies that serve the poor could do with that much money in their yearly budgets.

But the reasons for keeping this longtime community tradition outweigh reasons for letting it go. The donations are used directly for the poor, and the Christmas Fund is truly a community effort, supported by large and small donations.

Speltz and the bureau’s 275 other volunteers know this other reason: Stories are told at the Christmas Bureau across socioeconomic lines. These stories might not get told anywhere else at any other time of year, because no other communal space exists to exchange these stories among so many.

At the Christmas Bureau, volunteers such as Speltz learn that there are many reasons people are poor and that the solutions to community poverty will never be simple.

The solutions begin in relationships. Relationships begin in conversations, and thousands of conversations take place at the Christmas Bureau each December.

These stories form the bigger story of who we are as a community. The Inland Northwest is a place where children donate pennies, and millionaires donates thousands, so that poorer families can eat holiday meals together and have presents for their kids under Christmas trees.

This is a story in which to take pride, and the main reason the Christmas Bureau remains vital year after year.