Old Quarters Destroyed in Fire 3 Months Ago : With New Offices, Volunteer Center Struggles to Get Back in Sync

Jerri Spoehel kept the few souvenirs of her office that remained after an electrical fire destroyed the Van Nuys building housing the Volunteer Center of the San Fernando Valley.

There is a glass paperweight awarded to Spoehel, the center’s executive director, which was cracked by the heat. There are a sooty coffee mug and shreds of a charred letter.

But on Wednesday, Spoehel and other staff members put aside bad memories to officially open new offices at Hamlin Street and Vesper Avenue, 3 months after the Aug. 24 fire.

“We’re still not back to normal around here,” Spoehel said. “But it’s a lot better. . . .”

The center finds volunteer jobs for about 2,100 people a month, Spoehel said, three-quarters of whom are sentenced to volunteer work instead of jail by Los Angeles County judges. Financial support comes from the court system, from federal, state and local grants and from private contributions.

During the weeks after the fire, the center’s work continued out of makeshift offices tucked into homes, other social service agencies and even car trunks.

“I asked my staff how much their offices weighed one day,” Spoehel said. “I know how much mine weighs because I’ve been carrying it around.”

For volunteer Jim LeQuesne, who serves as media liaison, the most important aspect of the new offices is that they are in a fixed location.

Although the staff began moving in mid-October, the new 4,000-square-foot quarters remain sparsely furnished. At Wednesday’s celebration, two Kaiser Permanente medical centers presented a check for $6,000 for the facility’s community service efforts and to help bring it back on line.

But the center’s most important resources--contacts with companies and agencies willing to employ volunteers--will be more difficult to replace than supplies and furnishings.

Alethea Ludowitz, director of the Retired Senior Volunteer Program at the center, found names by tracing the mailing labels of her monthly newsletter through the post office.

John Glass, manager of the Juvenile Community Service Program at the center, had less luck tracking down the youths sent to him for probationary service. The probation division in charge of monitoring the youths’ progress also had its office in the building that burned.

Glass said he was sure that some of his clients had never finished their required service.

“In a way it made it easy, because I wasn’t responsible anymore,” Glass said. “But it really put the burden on the kids to finish on their own.”