VOLUNTEERISM / Filling a Gap : ‘Christmas in April’ Gives Gifts of Hope : Workers tackle the needs of low-income homeowners, but their efforts only go so far.

Marie Mercer, 79, who is confined to her bed with diabetes, found it “a very hard thing to believe,” but one recent Saturday a small army of volunteers marched in and slapped a bright new coat of paint on every room in her aging two-story house. Free of charge.

The event was part of “Christmas in April,” a volunteer effort launched here seven years ago to meet a need that budget-starved government programs cannot or do not fill. Every spring, hundreds of citizens--lawyers, blue-collar union workers, government officials, rich dowagers and school teachers--give up one day to paint, plaster and hammer nails to renovate and repair homes owned by elderly or handicapped persons with low incomes.

“Everyone is willing to help his neighbor. You just need somebody to get it organized,” said Thomas A. Kennelly, a former Watergate defense attorney and federal prosecutor who helped get the movement going here in 1983. “The thing is contagious.”

Indeed, the idea reflects the spirit of volunteerism which President Bush --with his “thousand points of light”--has commended as an alternative to government action on serious social problems.

Yet if Christmas in April suggests the potential strength of volunteers, it also underscores their limits.

Clones of the Washington program--itself inspired by a Midland, Tex., plan--have sprung up in 42 other cities and enlisted some 90,000 workers to renovate an estimated 6,000 houses in just the past few years. But that accomplishment represents less than 1% of the need: There are 9 million elderly, low-income homeowners in America, the vast majority of them women. Over one-third live alone.

As Kennelly is quick to say: “This effort was never designed to replace federal housing programs for the poor or the elderly.” Federal housing aid for the poor was cut back drastically under President Ronald Reagan, however, and it remains a victim of tightening budgets.

The urban equivalent of an old-fashioned barn-raising, the idea seems to work for four basic reasons: it produces a valuable result, it calls for a limited commitment of time, it brings together people from diverse backgrounds who find they like the experience and it answers an apparently widespread yearning among relatively well-off Americans to do something concrete about the problems of the less fortunate.

In Washington, Christmas in April renovated 103 homes this spring; among the volunteers, 21 law firms each took on a house. “The almost universal reaction among our people is what a good time they have had!” Kennelly said. “You may be working alongside a bank teller or a federal judge. It’s one day only. There are no committee meetings, and you can immediately see what you’ve accomplished.” Since each event occupies only one day--8 a.m. to 4 p.m. is standard--workers try not to bite off more than they can chew. At Marie Mercer’s home, for example, an advance team determined several weeks ago that 12 volunteers should be able to paint the interior of her six-room house in no more than eight hours. But they found they had time to paint the porch, too.

Volunteers with station wagons shuttled supplies to each project. Most supplies were donated by construction companies or by the AFL-CIO Building Trades Council.

“I was so happy for this work because our home is getting old and I’m disabled,” Mercer said. “My husband Charles is 84. He used to do a lot of the work, but he’s been sick in recent years.”

Trevor Armbrister, a Washington journalist who helped start the program here, said neighborhood churches or local agencies suggest homeowners each year who are most in need.

“This is one of the few major activities in the capital that is nonpartisan and nonpolitical,” Armbrister said. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp, convinced the idea can help prevent homelessness, showed up at a work site last year to wield a paint brush.

Others who have lent their talents to Christmas in April include civil rights leader Vernon E. Jordan Jr. and Reps. Robert T. Matsui (D-Sacramento) and Guy Vander Jagt (R-Mich.).

Former President Jimmy Carter has been active in a similar program, called Habitat for Humanity, which uses volunteers to build houses from scratch for sale, interest-free, to low-income families.

Kennelly said volunteers in San Francisco and Palo Alto have started their own “Christmas” programs. A project is being promoted in Los Angeles for next year by a group including Lori Speese of Neighborhood Housing Services and Kirk Hallahan, a vice president of Coast Savings & Loan Assn.