Volunteer Efforts Sometimes Go Untapped : Aid: Some find they cannot give away their help as Rebuild L.A. struggles to organize corps. Activists fear the public will lose interest.

By BOB SIPCHEN

Aug. 16, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

On the afternoon of April 29, Carol Ann Kenny ripped through her Rolodex, reminding folks about the upcoming volunteer fair she had organized in Century City.

Her spiel to the Urban League, People-Coordinated Services and more than 30 other organizations was the same. The conference would be a great opportunity to buttonhole elusive entertainment executives--to get them to volunteer in the panoply of ongoing efforts to feed the poor, house the homeless and fix this crumbling mess of a city.

Then the verdicts came in the case of the four police officers charged in the Rodney G. King beating.

Within 36 hours, the city’s do-gooder spirit spontaneously ignited amid the ashes of the riots. As volunteers stormed through the streets with brooms and dustpans, the 24-year-old Kenny--on the job as director of the City Hall branch of the Volunteer Center of Los Angeles for only a few months--received an abrupt baptism.

In the next month, more than 10,000 people called the center and a disaster hot line with offers of help, keeping the buttons on the phone banks in City Hall flashing like so many points of light.

But now, three months later, some people worry that those lights may be burning out, doused by impatience and frustration.

Many volunteers connected with agencies and went right to work. But from the start, lines of communication were often tangled, as calls from eager volunteers and desperate charities whizzed back and forth across Los Angeles.

Rebuild L.A. eventually assumed the role of volunteer clearinghouse. But after dutifully logging thousands of names, the private-sector civic renewal effort is still debating how to utilize the would-be helpers.

Meanwhile, many overworked charities--struggling to overcome urban woes--were ill-prepared to accommodate the sudden wealth of volunteer talent.

“The volume of people calling in, and the agencies needing help was so great, and the need to respond so immediate, it was difficult to make the most efficient placements of volunteers possible,” said Kenny. “It was a logistical nightmare.”

People working in the subculture linking nonprofit organizations and community service providers did not need a riot to inform them that Los Angeles had deep problems.

But many were stunned and encouraged by the surge of volunteer interest that followed. Southern California Gas Co. employees flocked to the African-American Community Unity Center. USC sororities waded into the ashes of Koreatown. Members of Westside synagogues scrambled to distribute used furniture to the homeless. People who live in the damaged communities stepped outside and pitched in.

“The riot-related response was incredible,” said Tanya Tull, who has spent “12 nightmarish years” encouraging people to help the poor.

“People’s outpouring of loving and caring was the great prize of the civil unrest,” said Tull, founder of the homeless relief agencies Para Los Ninos and Beyond Shelter.

But Los Angeles after the riots, like Los Angeles after a drought, was hard-pressed to handle the unexpected deluge--as prospective volunteer George Willis found as he worked his way down a list of agencies published in The Times.

“It was pretty hard to find one that needed me,” he said. “Most only wanted money. It was kind of frustrating.”

Temporarily without work as a free-lance special effects technician and model builder for film studios, Willis was eager to volunteer his skills and tools. After calling eight to 10 agencies, he connected with the American Network for Services and Relief.

The aid organization put him to work distributing food. When that need was filled, he did another brief volunteer stint boarding up windows for a church-run charity.

“It took hours to get everyone organized. It was more like a bake sale than trying to get something done,” Willis said. “People were let down by the fact that we were ready to work and there was nothing to do.”

Bob Pratt knows that “nothing to do” is an absurdity when confronting Los Angeles’ myriad problems.

But Pratt, president of the Los Angeles Chapter of Volunteers of America, agrees that “there simply wasn’t an adequate infrastructure to make volunteerism work well” after the riots.

And he is not surprised that social service agencies fumbled what may have been a unique opportunity to tap the city’s pool of talent and enthusiasm.

People who work on urban problems, he said, are overwhelmed with the day-to-day struggle of helping. Therefore, few agencies have taken time to develop a strategy for using volunteers.

“We’re losing ground,” Pratt said. “You tend to get caught up in trying to meet ever-increasing needs in an environment where there are ever-decreasing resources.”

After Mayor Tom Bradley established Rebuild L.A. and put Peter V. Ueberroth in charge of it, he turned over his City Hall volunteer hot line to the new organization. Brian Wilbur, 22, was among those who stepped forward to field the calls.

The UCLA student talked to company owners with 30 employees eager to donate time, to unemployed laborers willing to shovel rubble, “to one guy who wanted to donate the world’s biggest baklava to save L.A.”

But Rebuild L.A. was not sure of its mission--let alone how to utilize the flood of volunteers. Wilbur found himself asking callers: “Can you fax us a resume?” and putting names and skills onto forms to be added to a growing database.

After the hot line shut down last month, Wilbur landed a volunteer internship with the city’s disaster preparedness division.

But Rebuild L.A.’s plans for utilizing potential volunteers who contacted the hot line are still “inchoate,” said spokesman Fred MacFarlane.

In the days before the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, a Times article compared nascent efforts to organize volunteers for the games to the flight of a gooney bird, “a hilariously awkward creature that becomes airborne only after a grotesque, waddling takeoff.”

Eventually, Ueberroth’s Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee did get things off the ground, organizing 70,000 volunteers and paid workers to do everything from gathering sprinters’ abandoned sweat suits to accounting. A significant element of the Olympics’ success, everyone agrees, was the goodwill that the volunteers radiated to the community.

Rebuild L.A. is still in the “brainstorming and development” phase of organizing its volunteers, said MacFarlane, who is on loan from Irvin Hampton Co., where he is a senior vice president.

More than a dozen such “loaned executives,” their salaries paid by their employers, are working full time at Rebuild L.A., MacFarlane said, and many volunteers are also doing tasks around the office.

Rebuild L.A. should know by the end of the year how it will utilize the volunteers whose names are languishing in the databanks, said MacFarlane, who gets impatient with those who suggest that the wheels are turning too slowly.

“This is not a sitcom, where we can think about a problem and come up with a solution in 30 minutes, . . . where we can look at an issue and tie a nice red ribbon around it and say: ‘There. It’s solved,’ ” he said. The worst thing that could happen, MacFarlane contends, is “to have some slapdash effort that misuses people’s time, talent and skills.”

Pratt--whose Volunteers of America got about 60 offers of help in the days after the upheaval--does not blame Ueberroth for not quickly finding a place for everyone who offered help. That is not Rebuild L.A.’s role, he says.

But he is upset.

Money is not going to pour into Los Angeles to solve the city’s longstanding problems, he said. So the wise use of volunteers--by somebody-- is crucial. Pratt said under the circumstances, the “significant discontinuity” between the initial flood of caring and an organized effort to capitalize on those resources has led to a loss of volunteers.

Tull also believes that the volunteers’ outpouring needs to be channeled by someone, if for no other reason than that it gives the “haves” of the city an opportunity to meet the “have-nots.”

“People don’t understand how the poor live. They don’t know people who each month must decide to buy food or pay the rent,” she said. “I don’t blame people for not caring enough. They simply didn’t see the problems the way those who work daily on urban problems do.”

Even when volunteers are brought face to face with problems and offered a role in solving them, it does not mean they will stay dedicated for life.

“My fear is that (volunteers) will get tired when it doesn’t change fast,” Tull said, “and they’re going to leave.”

In a lifetime of volunteering and supervising volunteers, Eve Reid has learned a lot about motivation and burnout.

“What you’ll find is normally busy people are the ones who volunteer, and they don’t have time to stand around and do nothing,” the Rancho Palos Verdes woman said. “So it’s really important to use them well and treat them well to keep them coming back.”

When the riots hit, Reid went to work at a start-up project called New South Central. For six weeks, she made the drive to the inner city, joining people from Union Bank, Atlantic Richfield Co., Carl’s Jr. and the community to distribute food and clothing and serve hot meals.

“Then it fizzled out,” she said. “People lose interest. . . . At first it’s new . . . then they go back to their lives.”

Still, the volunteers’ contribution cannot be calculated in work hours alone. “For one thing, it brought people together who would never have come together,” Reid said. “They saw each other and had an experience that I feel really helped break down some preconceptions.”

With such encounters in mind, Reid devised an idea for a continuing human exchange. She calls it “Bridge for Unity,” and is about to turn her plan over to a community-based group for implementation. Meanwhile, she has signed on with Rebuild L.A. to help coordinate its use of volunteers.

While the lack of any continuing effort to connect volunteers to jobs has probably caused some people to forget about helping, there are, by all appearances, continuing signs of commitment all over town.

For 25-year-old Vaughn Allen, the riots provided the impetus to act on good intentions he had been harboring for years. Big Brothers of Greater Los Angeles experienced a 40% increase in calls after the riots, and Allen was among those calling.

As he went through the clearing process to be paired up with a boy needing male guidance, his friends were watching. “They’d hear what it entailed, and say: ‘Hey. Not bad.’ Now they all plan to do it,” Allen said.

Willis, the model builder, found that he had to be persistent to get someone to accept his offers of help. But that tenacity paid off. He has steady work whenever he has time, loading trucks for the American Red Cross. And he is waiting for a call from a women’s shelter that needs rebuilding.

The “you-get-more-than-you-give” cliche is repeated often by post-riot volunteers. And for some, volunteering after the riots has become particularly significant.

As looters edged toward Chase Manhattan Investment Services in Beverly Hills, office manager Glen Titan led the building’s evacuation. Like many Angelenos, he was frightened.

“I basically fled the city. I went to a friend’s house 50 miles to the north,” the New York native said.

But as he sat watching television, he had a change of heart. “I figured if everyone put in a couple hours,” Titan said, “the city would at least be moving in the right direction.”

At first, the 32-year-old’s efforts to volunteer were met by “the bureaucratic runaround. I called all the hot lines. I was getting passed around.”

But finally he connected. He went to the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Mid-City and became “part of the bucket brigade,” loading trucks with relief aid. He cannot calculate how much the few hours he spent working in the inner city improved things. But it changed him.

Working side by side with people of all colors, seeing how dedicated everyone was to making things work, Titan said, “will keep me here for the rest of my life.”