Thousands of volunteers to participate in Big Sunday Weekend

From the Bay Area to San Diego, tens of thousands of volunteers throughout California are expected to participate in the nation’s largest community service initiative as Big Sunday Weekend, a three-day event, kicks off on Friday.

Celebrating its 15th anniversary, Big Sunday’s mission is to build community through hundreds of community service projects, including food and blood drives, delivery of meals to seniors and the planting of vegetable gardens on school campuses, organizers said.

“It’s not just people with resources” who volunteer, said Rachel Schwartz, a spokeswoman for the event. “It’s not just the haves and have-nots. We have people who are celebrities and people from skid row. The fact is that everyone, regardless of who they are or where they come from, has some way that they can help someone.”

The annual event was initially started in Los Angeles by David Levinson, a Hollywood-based writer, as a one-day event. It now covers three days, stretches across California and, for the first time this year, will be expanded to include Nevada, Florida, North Carolina and Oklahoma.

Levinson has written a book about his experience with Big Sunday and his years of volunteering, called “Everyone Helps, Everyone Wins: How Absolutely Anyone Can Pitch In, Help Out and Give Back to Make the World a Better Place”.

“My problems always seemed small -- silly, even -- by comparison,” Levinson wrote. “I mean, how could I be upset that some 24-year-old development exec was rejecting my script when I was talking with a family who’d been living under a bridge.”

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carlos.lozano@latimes.com