The Family That Gives Together . . . : Trends: More parents and kids are working side by side as volunteers, trying to reconnect with their communities and one another. The rewards are huge.

Amanda Greenberger, 17, used to sleep until noon on Saturdays, then maybe sit around, eat potato chips, channel surf through the TV and, at the end of the day, wish she’d done something else.

Then last year, she and her father, Martin, who live in West Los Angeles, were galvanized by the rioting they saw on TV. Like many Angelenos, they wanted to do something to help. Unlike many, they found a way to do it as a family.

Together, they signed up with Habitat for Humanity, an organization that helps build low-cost housing for needy families. Now Amanda says: “When you come home from a day working on a house, you’re really tired. But it’s a good kind of tired. You know you helped make a difference.”

She’s proud to go with her father. “This is something we connect on, things we both value and that we both care enough about to put our effort into it. It’s something valuable. You can point to it and say, wow, my dad and I helped build that house. It just feels really good.”

Over the past five years, more family members have been volunteering together, according to the Independent Sector, a national coalition of nonprofit agencies in Washington, D.C. They say they are trying to reconnect with their communities and one another.

“You can’t sit around and watch TV all the time or go to malls all the time,” said Michael Glaser of West Los Angeles, who has volunteered for several years with his wife, Rise, and children, Marc, 9, and Tiffany, 11. “With what’s going on with the economy the last few years, you don’t have the money to do all that shopping. (With volunteering) you can do things to help other people. You get a lot more joy out of what you’re doing.”

Together, the Glaser family has served meals at homeless shelters, provided child care for homeless families, worked at KCET pledge drives and planted trees. “We still go back and look at the trees to see how they’re growing,” he said.

Family volunteering not only helps the community but also strengthens family communication and helps pass on positive values to younger family members, said Janet Harrison, director of the Volunteer Center of Los Angeles.

In fact, some people believe the benefits of family volunteering are so great to both families and the community that they are working to build a national movement.

Family Matters, a fledgling, $1.5-million national initiative sponsored by the Points of Light Foundation, aims to formalize on a national level what families like the Greenbergers and Glasers have been doing on their own. Virginia Austin, national project director of the Washington-based program said that it’s almost a cliche to talk about the disintegration of the American family, and community service is no magical solution. But volunteering can give families a sense of connectedness and purpose, she said. And passed down from generation to generation, family volunteering can jump-start an ongoing cycle for social change.

“It addresses the vacuum that comes from families not working together on farms or for a common agenda in an urban setting. It really addresses the fragmentation of the family unit,” Austin said.

So far, Family Matters has started to mobilize families for community service in six areas: Los Angeles, New York, Appalachia, Minneapolis, Houston and Atlanta.

The local program, operated by the Volunteer Center of Los Angeles, is expected to start this fall to recruit, train and refer family volunteers to about 30 community groups seeking volunteers in East, West and South-Central Los Angeles.

Harrison said the program has adopted a broad, non-traditional definition of family. “We don’t look at this as a Dan Quayle family situation. We are defining family as any group of two or more people who consider themselves to be a family. A stepmother and a stepson, an uncle and niece, a grandparent and grandchild, an unmarried couple, a group of people who live together.”

Family volunteering can especially benefit single-parent families or non-custodial parents looking for alternatives to unsupervised TV watching--shown in a recent Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development study to be the most popular way for teen-agers to spend their free time. It can also help middle-age children find common activities with their senior parents.

Through the Volunteer Center or other groups such as Habitat for Humanity or Rhapsody in Green, families can find age-appropriate volunteer activities that include removing graffiti, planting trees, visiting invalids, painting murals, cleaning up schools, baby-sitting for parents who are going to school or teaching people to read.

Some efforts have already begun. Sandra Lopez, volunteer-services coordinator for the center, said she helped a group of immigrants from Central America clean up an area of the Los Angeles River near their homes. About 20 families brought children of all ages for a day of work and a picnic. “We got such a good response,” Lopez said. “When we got there, the river was filthy, full of trash. Afterward, we went up to this little hill and looked down to the river. The people said, ‘Oh my goodness, we did this. Look at this river, it’s clean.’ They felt so proud.”

Every Saturday morning, the group also cleans up their children’s school, Rosemont Elementary, Lopez said.

In East Los Angeles, a group of former gang members and their children are volunteering to set a good example for their children. Known as Las Familias, the families have cleaned up graffiti, served dinner to senior citizens, wrapped Christmas toys and assembled Easter baskets for some shelters. Even toddlers have helped by stuffing bags or crushing empty boxes by jumping on them.

Harrison said she hopes to encourage families to volunteer outside their own neighborhoods and to introduce them to different areas and cultures in the city.

“Some schools need to be fixed up everywhere in this city. . . . For kids who don’t go to a (deteriorated) school, it’s a wonderful experience for them to see another world. . . .

“We hope one of the outcomes is that more people will be out there, meeting more people who are not just like them, and sharing family things with each other by giving to the community and strengthening their own family while they’re doing it.”

So far, the largest obstacle to family volunteering has been coordinating the schedules of all the family members so they can be in one place at one time, Austin said.

Some family volunteers said they began early bringing children along to their own activities and adding responsibilities as the kids grew older.

Longtime volunteer Sheila Goldberg of Venice said she and her husband, Michael, started bringing their children along to fund-raisers and political campaigns when the kids were toddlers. “When they were children, we said, ‘We’re doing it, so you’ll come along.’ They never balked.”

For 14 years, the Goldbergs have raised money for the Venice Family Clinic, each year organizing the Venice Art Walk, which draws 5,000 people. Every year, the children pitched in, stuffing and stamping envelopes, selling, running errands, doing photography or building things.

Volunteering relieves the tendency of families to focus on their own problems, Goldberg said: “You have a problem you are solving together and it makes you a cohesive unit.”

By now, Goldberg said volunteering is second nature for her family.

Her son Jay, 25, served two years in the Peace Corps in Africa. Daughter Tracey, 27, worked two years in a UCLA literacy program.

“They volunteer every time they are in town,” Goldberg said. “They know it’s a way of life.”