At Year 25, Interfaith Group Tries New Tactics

Some 25 years ago, half a dozen San Fernando Valley liberal religious activists gathered at the parish house of St. Michael and All Angels’ Episcopal Church in Studio City for a political wake and an organizational rebirth.

Mary Larson of Encino, one of those who attended the meeting, remembered the group as being somewhat dispirited.

Some months earlier, its members had organized as the Church and Temple Laymen’s Committee to fight Proposition 14, an initiative sponsored by the real estate industry and designed to overturn state and local anti-discrimination housing laws then on the books.

The measure had been approved overwhelmingly, and committee members were feeling the anger of others in their congregations who had supported it.

“It was the first time that local churches and temples had had to face a civil rights issue in their own back yard, and a lot of people were angry that we had pushed them on it,” recalled Larson, who joined the committee as a result of her social action work at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in Tarzana.

Struggle Continued

The battle had been lost, but group members were not about to give up the struggle. Instead of disbanding, they decided to create an ongoing organization to provide local religious activists with a vehicle for tackling controversial social issues in an interfaith setting free from denominational and institutional constraints.

They named the organization the San Fernando Valley Interfaith Council.

“I saw it as a place for the well-intentioned rabbi or minister or layman who was looking for another, like-minded person to talk with,” said North Hollywood attorney and labor arbitrator William Levin, another early member of the group.

“I perceived the focus of the council to be traditional, liberal issues like separation of church and state and civil rights,” he said.

More than two decades later, VIC, as the council is known, remains the only organization of its kind in the Valley.

“If there were a crisis in the community, VIC is where I would go for assistance,” said Rabbi Steven B. Jacobs of Encino’s Shir-Chadash New Reform Congregation.

Anniversary Celebration

Tonight, a crowd of about 300 people will attend a Sheraton Universal Hotel banquet celebrating the council’s 25 years of existence. Religious and political leaders, community activists, industrialists and celebrities will be on hand as Olympic champion and Valley resident Rafer Johnson, Los Angeles City Councilman Ernani Bernardi, Valley banker and philanthropist Arthur Aston and AIDS Project L.A. executive Jamie Henderson are honored for their contributions to the community.

The $125-a-plate affair is the most ambitious fund-raising event that VIC has attempted, and a great deal of effort has been expended on getting the Valley corporate community to contribute generously.

For VIC, that corporate involvement represents a major tactical switch, but one that VIC’s leadership sees as necessary if the organization is to remain relevant and effective in a changing society.

VIC Executive Director Barry Smedberg, who took over that position in September, said: “To really be an interfaith council, we need to deal with the more conservative faith groups. We’re weak in the area of Catholic participation, and we’ve had little or no dealings with some of the large conservative churches in the Valley.

“To really make an impact, we’ve got to get the corporate sector involved. Historically, we’ve been cast as ‘60s liberals. Today, we’re really just people who care about those who have received a raw deal, about those who have no voice. Putting theology aside, helping people in need of help is not a liberal or conservative issue.”

Volunteer Group

At its heart, VIC remains a largely volunteer organization concerned with the immediate social issues of the day, as well as the deeper problems of intolerance and exploitation. It organizes educational forums on interfaith and interracial issues and sponsors gatherings of the clergy and public discussions on the homeless, gangs, AIDS and other issues. Earlier this year, VIC organized the first Valleywide interfaith service honoring Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

But since the mid-1970s, VIC has become increasingly involved in direct-assistance programs that have swelled the organization’s annual budget to $1.5 million, 90% of which comes from government contracts, Smedberg said.

Working out of rented space on the grounds of Chatsworth United Methodist Church, VIC oversees two multipurpose senior citizen centers in Pacoima and Van Nuys that help solve problems involving housing, transportation, companionship, Social Security, health and other matters for nearly 13,000 elderly people each year.

A VIC Meals on Wheels program brings 69,000 hot meals each year to the Valley’s housebound elderly. Another 149,000 meals are served to other financially pinched seniors at 10 sites scattered around the central and north Valley.

Seven VIC-affiliated food pantries distribute emergency groceries to another 160,000 poor people of all ages in the Valley, and VIC’s AIDS Coalition is attempting to gain funding for another food program to help those bedridden with the acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Marsha Van Valkenburg, chairwoman of the AIDS Coalition, said the group eventually hopes to also open a Valley hospice for dying AIDS patients.

More than 60 staff members are employed in the various direct-assistance programs, but volunteers remain the key to VIC’s success, Smedberg said. VIC has only about 400 paid members, 42 of which are churches, temples or other religious congregations, but about 100 individuals--members and non-members alike--contribute more than 4,000 volunteer hours each month.

“And that doesn’t include board members’ time and emergency needs,” Smedberg said.

The move into providing direct service has been a double-edged sword. On one hand, it has enabled VIC to survive as an institution while meeting human needs that had been largely un-met in the Valley, present and former VIC officials said. Without the governmental funding that these services have brought in, VIC would have been hard-pressed to financially survive, they said.

“It’s tough to fund interfaith activities,” Smedberg said. “If you can fund it by providing needed programs for the elderly, for example, that’s what you do. The programs stabilized the organization.”

At the same time, maintaining the programs has stretched VIC’s human resources to the limit and forced staff to spend a great deal of time on fund raising and dealing with government bureaucracies and politicians. Some VIC old-timers say that emphasis, however well-intentioned, has also muted the organization’s original intent.

“There was a tendency to try and do everything, to take on more and more projects,” said Avanelle M. Smith, VIC’s executive director from 1973 to 1987. “The board would vote for something and then leave it to the staff to take care of it. I’m still tired. I was really burned out by the time I retired.”

Mary Larson said accepting government money has dulled VIC’s ability to speak out on controversial social issues. “If you want to stay on the cutting edge, you can’t be beholden to funding sources,” she said.

Shelter for Homeless

VIC’s most trying foray into providing direct services came in 1986 when it purchased the 72-room Fiesta Motel in North Hollywood for $2.2 million, renovated the facility and reopened it as the Valley’s first emergency shelter for the homeless.

By the end of that year, however, VIC was swamped with unexpected expenses, and operation of the shelter was turned over to the Los Angeles Family Housing Corp. Last month, Family Housing, unable to meet its mortgage payments, filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the federal Bankruptcy Code in a last-ditch effort to keep the shelter open.

“It was an unwise thing to get involved with,” said Lois V. Hamer, who has been associated with VIC for 15 years and is vice president for client services. “There was a lot of discussion over it at the time but, in the end, people’s human concerns overrode their not being prepared for the job.

“It terribly overextended us.”

Despite the stress that the shelter placed on VIC, the Rev. Allyn D. Axelton, VIC’s vice president for program services, views the “faith and courage” that prompted VIC to take a chance on the shelter as perhaps the organization’s greatest asset.

“The shelter was a bigger undertaking than we wanted to pursue, but it was still a success for us,” said Axelton, who also directs the United Campus Ministry program at Cal State Northridge.

“We managed to get it going. There might have been better ways to go about it, but no one else was willing to take it on. Success in this area is getting something started and raising people’s awareness in the process, not making it problem-free.”

The Rev. G. Nelson Stringer of Canoga Park First United Methodist Church will begin his second year as president of VIC’s board of directors July 1. For him, VIC’s future is as an organization that continues to be deeply involved in providing direct services, whatever the pitfalls.

“Times have changed and, as they have, needs have changed, and we have had to change as an organization,” he said. “The way to social change is not always one of confrontation. VIC seeks to create change through reconciliation, but that doesn’t mean we’ve lost our social-justice witness.”

Reaching out to the corporate world--including firms linked to the defense industry, a move that VIC’s leadership might in the past have rejected on ideological grounds--is one attempt at reconciliation, Stringer said.

“To focus on one group as being the bad guys is simplistic,” he said. “All of us have a degree of responsibility. We’re all part of the problem as well as the solution.”

Appointing a local representative of the conservative Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the recently formed VIC advisory board is another move toward reconciliation, Stringer said.

“We’ve never been elitists,” he said.