College Aid Goal Set at $5 Million : Education: The United Negro College Fund announces a campaign to help low-income L.A. minority students attend historically black schools. Grants would be based less on grades than on potential.

Pledging to help rebuild Los Angeles by giving youths a chance for an education, the United Negro College Fund announced Friday the creation of a $5-million endowment fund to assist young people who otherwise could not afford college.

William H. Gray, president of the fund, joined Mayor Tom Bradley and more than two dozen local educators and business leaders at Dorsey High School in Los Angeles to launch a fund-raising campaign for the “Ladders of Hope” program.

The effort has raised $1 million toward its $5-million goal. The fund will be used to help low-income minority students in the Los Angeles area attend one of 41 historically black colleges.

But unlike many scholarships, which require recipients to excel academically, this fund will target teen-agers who may not have the best grades but show potential for succeeding in college.

“We’re talking about going into those communities like South Los Angeles, taking kids to whom nobody has said, ‘You can make it,’ and saying, ‘Here’s a ladder. You can make it,’ ” Gray said. “That’s what makes this unique.”

Gray, speaking in an auditorium filled with Dorsey students, said the program was sparked by the unrest that shook Los Angeles in the spring. “It’s a response not only to a crisis here in the Los Angeles community,” Gray said, “but to a crisis in our nation. . . . If America is to compete, we must utilize all of our resources.”

The first scholarship recipients will be in the high school class of 1993, Gray said. An advisory council made up of local ministers, educators and civic leaders will determine the number, amount and qualifications for the grants.

The most immediate task at hand is to raise the additional $4 million to meet the program’s funding goal. Times Mirror Corp., Nestle USA Inc. and MCA Corp. have joined in contributing the first $1 million.

“It’s our hope other foundations, corporations, as well as prominent individuals, will join us in this effort so we can get to $5 million,” Gray said.

Bernard Kinsey, co-chairman of Rebuild L.A., said the group has pledged its support to the program and hopes to help organizers solicit contributions.

“We think it’s important because it’s dealing with a segment of the population that has (traditionally) gone through the cracks,” Kinsey said. “That’s what makes this very special.”

Though the grants will be available to non-black students, Teshana Gipson, a Dorsey senior and an African-American, told those gathered at the news conference why the chance to attend a historically black college would be important to her and other black teen-agers.

Speaking of a recent tour of black colleges, Gipson said, “They made it clear black people weren’t minorities. It made me feel good.”

The United Negro College Fund is a philanthropy that has raised millions of dollars for black colleges. Recently there has been a surge in enrollment at these colleges, with many students coming from California, according to officials. Last fall, 1,600 of the 51,159 students enrolled in United Negro College Fund schools came from California, a 31% increase over 1988 enrollment figures.

In another partnership between business and education, Pacific Bell announced Friday that it will pay employees who take time off to volunteer as tutors and assistants to teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Most of the volunteers will work in schools in areas affected by the civil unrest.