Huge Job-Training Center Planned : Urban aid: The facility would be the largest of its kind in the West and is aimed at residents in the riot areas. Backers hope to instruct 5,000 people in four years with the aid of major corporations.

Civic and corporate leaders are expected to announce plans today for creating the largest job-training center of its kind in the West for residents of areas torn by the Los Angeles riots.

The center, which planners hope will train 5,000 people in four years with the support of major corporations, will be run by Opportunities Industrialization Centers/America (OIC), a 28-year-old Philadelphia-based organization that has more than 70 facilities in the United States.

Chevron Corp.--the main corporate player in the center’s planning--has provided OIC with $1.3 million to purchase a former AT & T operator services and training center near Los Angeles Southwest College.

The training center for the hard-core unemployed is the largest post-riot revitalization project to be announced so far. It will train people to work entry-level jobs in industries such as petroleum and hotel services.

Plans for the center were developed independent of Rebuild L.A., the group that Mayor Tom Bradley formed to oversee the renewal of riot-affected neighborhoods, said the Rev. Leon H. Sullivan, founder of OIC and a prominent civil rights leader. But Sullivan said he considers the center a part of the city’s rebuilding effort and is “looking forward” to support from Rebuild L.A. co-chairman Peter V. Ueberroth.

“We want to think of it as something that supports the efforts of Rebuild L.A., but it was not something initiated by them,” said Sullivan in a telephone interview.

Rod Spackman, local spokesman for Kenneth Derr, Chevron’s chairman, called the San Francisco-based firm’s financial contribution “a major, major grant.” He said Chevron also has pledged to create and staff a petroleum industry training component for OIC and will hire as many as 60 people in entry-level jobs in the center’s first year.

Similar pledges are expected from corporations in other industries, including the Adolph Coors Co. and the Marriot Corp., Spackman said. IBM and local community colleges and transportation agencies also have promised support, he said.

“For us to participate in this type of program is rather unique,” Spackman said of Chevron. “But we wanted to do something long term and sustainable.”

The plans have been kept under wraps, he said, to allow OIC to purchase the 20,000-square-foot building and surrounding land, which takes up a city block on Western Avenue at 111th Street just outside the city’s southern border. Escrow is expected to close this week.

A news conference at the site is scheduled for this morning and is expected to be attended by local elected officials, corporate and civic representatives, Sullivan and Rosa Parks, whose refusal to sit in the rear of an Alabama bus became a symbol of the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement.

Bradley, who is out of town, will be represented by Deputy Mayor Linda Griego.

Sullivan said the Western Avenue center will be a hub for a series of smaller feeder facilities that will provide remedial skills and other basic training for people who have long been out of the work force or who were never in it.

There are already several small OIC satellite operations in the Los Angeles area. Locally based personnel will operate the new center, Sullivan said.

OIC/America and its sister program, OIC International, with facilities in 16 African countries and one in Europe, is often spoken of as the largest job-training program in the world. It is considered a pioneer in job-training programs operated by community-based groups.

At its peak in 1980, before federal cutbacks drastically reduced its operations, it received $132 million annually in funding, mostly from government grants.

Its largest center to date in California is its OIC/West facility in Menlo Park in the Bay Area.

Sharon Williams, director of that program, said it serves about 2,000 people a year, not all of whom receive full job training. The Menlo Park facility trains people to work in the computer, electronics and printing industries and in culinary arts and industrial maintenance, Williams said. The Los Angeles center will have similar components but will be much larger, Sullivan said.

The OIC programs have been credited with training more than 1 million people in their nearly three decades of existence.

Chevron spokesman Spackman said company officials visited the Menlo Park center and others and were impressed.

Spackman said discussions about what Chevron could do over the long term to help revitalize the city, particularly South-Central Los Angeles, first took place the week after the spring riots during Chevron’s annual board meeting, which coincidently was held here.

In the short term, he said, the firm provided $70,000 for emergency relief. It also began rebuilding 21 gasoline stations that were destroyed or damaged during the unrest.

Chevron knew of Sullivan and OIC, he said, because a Chevron official is on the program’s board of directors. Sullivan said OIC was already talking to local companies about what it could do.

In later discussions, Sullivan said, Chevron emerged as “the big daddy.”

Sullivan, a member of the Board of Directors of the General Motors Corp., moves easily in the corridors of government and corporate America.

He is best known as the author of the Sullivan Principles, a code of ethical conduct for American companies doing business in South Africa to which scores of large corporations adhered. He abandoned the principles in 1987 and urged firms to leave South Africa until apartheid is dismantled. He was a winner last year of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

His 70th birthday party in October was held at Carnegie Hall and celebrants included Jack Kemp, President Bush’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development; New York Mayor David Dinkins, and the Rev. William H. Gray III, head of the United Negro College Fund.

Sullivan founded OIC in 1964 in an abandoned former jail in North Philadelphia. He was then pastor of that city’s Zion Baptist Church.

The program was started with donations from 400 ministers who put up $1,000 each. The ministers had been conducting a boycott against businesses that they believed discriminated against African-Americans. When some of the business owners acceded to their demands and offered skilled jobs, the clergymen realized that many of their candidates needed training.

There was no other program like it in the country at the time, but it has since been widely emulated.

In its last five-year plan, OIC said it would seek greater corporate support to offset losses in government financing. Sullivan, however, said he eventually hopes the state and federal government will help finance the new center.