WESTERLO — A child who left a small, anonymous donation for the Westerlo Volunteer Fire Company’s New Building Fund has unwittingly spurred a larger surge of donations from people who were inspired by the child’s kindness.

Fire company member Kelly Keefe told The Enterprise this week that the initial $3.85 from the child — all in coins — has grown to $523.85 after 110 people matched that donation and a handful of people contributed larger donations after she posted about it online. 

Keefe said she was at her home next to the firehouse earlier this month when a car she didn’t recognize pulled up to the firehouse and a man got out to put something on the door. 

“I thought it was just someone posting a notice or something,” she said. “When we went over to get the mail, I looked over and there was a Ziploc bag with the money in it — and it was all change — and it said, ‘Donation from a child in Westerlo.’” 

Keefe said she and her fiancé decided to match the donation, as did their kids and their friends when they shared the news. As it continued to “snowball,” she said, Keefe made a post about it on Facebook. Within 24 hours, the donation had grown by nearly 100 times. 

“It was just a very positive thing, and in this climate these days, that’s not always the way things happen,” she said. 

The fire company has been fundraising for a new building, since the current one, which is 85 years old, is too small for modern firefighting equipment. Samantha and Debra Filkins wrote a letter to the Enterprise editor in 2022 as co-chairwomen of the company’s fundraising committee that the building has also experienced damage and decay, and is in an undesirable location. 

Replacement will be expensive — the East Berne Volunteer Fire Company took out a $2.7 million for its new firehouse — and Keefe said that “every little bit counts.”

Explaining that she was touched that “someone who is probably a real youngster took their cents that they saved up and decided to do something good with it,” she said the fire company would like to know who it was so they can properly thank the child.

But the most important thing from all of this, Keefe said, was the lesson that there is no such thing as a small act of kindness.

“Anything you do to help your community can really blossom into something so much bigger,” she said.