Making Changes for the Better : Charities: Assistance League leader Beverly Thrall oversees 1,300 members and dozens of projects that benefit thousands.

Beverly Thrall runs a $5-million annual budget, heads a forthcoming $8-million fund-raising campaign and supervises 50 other budgets.

She oversees 17 auxiliaries and 1,300 members with a board of 85 and an executive committee of 29.

She’s the captain of $12.5 million in real estate.

She works five days a week--for nothing.

Thrall is in her second term as president of the Assistance League of Southern California.

Founded in 1919 by the late Anne Banning to aid families of World War I veterans, the league provides a variety of services to 60,000 people a year.

“Those early Assistance League women were farsighted and miraculous in planning ahead,” Thrall says. “Many left us property or funds in their wills.”

The league’s other asset is people. “Today I work with some of the nicest, most unselfish women I have ever met,” she says.

In a world of working women, the league still harnesses the energies of non-working women while striving to bring young blood into its declining membership by such means as evening meetings for working women.

“At our peak we probably had 2,000 members. I am not sure young people today have the same commitment,” Thrall says. “We have a difficult time recruiting them. Maybe they are committed, but the circumstances of the world make it more difficult for them to help the less fortunate.”

Does this keep her awake nights? “Not really. The women we have are extraordinarily committed. We’ve also chartered a new group, Volunteers in Professions. They’re in their 20s and 30s and raising money to support our Family Service Agency, which counsels families with marital and child-behavior problems.”

The Assistance League occupies a colony of buildings on five acres surrounding 1370 St. Andrews Place. Here, in headquarters designed by architect Paul Williams, the league runs a tea room grossing $50,000 a month (frequented at lunch by workers from nearby Paramount Studio). Forty volunteer groups rent rooms for luncheons and meetings there.

In the same building, a gift shop grosses $200,000 a year. Across a couple of parking lots, a thrift shop generates $60,000 annually. Across the street in a little theater, the league’s Nine O’Clock Players stage plays for 10,000 youngsters, half admitted free.

From an old house nearby, Operation School Bell dispenses clothing to 600 needy children; each child receives two outfits of clothes each year. Across the street and around a corner, a day nursery serves 166 children from 44 countries. The Children’s Club offers supervised play and tutoring. Volunteers run the Over Fifty’s Club, a place for the elderly to play bridge and get counseling. Two Alzheimer’s day-care centers are supported.

In financial terms, the largest project is the $1.5-million seniors’ multipurpose center a mile from league headquarters in the old Hollywood police station at 6501 Fountain Ave. The second largest is the Volunteer Center in Panorama City, with a $1-million budget; the primary effort there is to place court-referred volunteers into volunteer jobs.

The Family Service Agency on Fernwood (at the league complex), with a budget of $350,000, offers counseling. A Western Region Asian Pacific Agency at the United Way building at 11646 W. Pico Blvd. in West Los Angeles is an outreach for literacy and acculturation services aiding Laotian, Thai, Vietnamese and other Asian families.

The league launches an $8-million campaign soon to build a $5-million building to centralize certain services, to provide for building improvements and to assure a $3-million rendowment.

Last Saturday at the Assistance League’s black-tie 34th Medallion Ball at the Biltmore, Thrall’s role was to bestow medallions on 25 young girls for completing four years of volunteer training (100 hours) and self-improvement courses designed to inspire them to community service.

The Assistance League doesn’t consume all of Thrall’s time.

“I have a really nice life,” she says. She’s married to Larry Thrall, prominent in merchant banking, the savings and loan business and commercial real estate. They have three grown children. Each Friday night the Thralls have dinner at 72 Market Street with the same good friends. When they’re at home, he cooks Italian food; she needlepoints, plays Chopin. They travel frequently to Hawaii.

The Thralls also fill their lives with culture. “We have tickets to everything. Larry and I go to the opera, ballet and Master Chorale. I have a twin sister, Betty Cook, and she and I go to the symphony and the Mark Taper.”

The energetic couple gets up early. They work out together with a trainer who comes to their home three times a week at 6:30 a.m.

Thrall grew up in a different milieu and with a commitment to voluntarism. The daughter of a Loma Linda bee farmer, Thrall spent childhood summers in Utah (as did the bees). Her mother, 80, works two days a week in a hospital, tap-dances in shows for convalescent homes, plays piano and tutors children at the YMCA.

“I think the spirit of volunteering was part of our family. We were always in Girl Scouts, and my mother was always on boards,” Thrall says.