RELIGION / JOHN DART : Groups Widen Quake Relief Effort : Aid: Religious organizations across the Valley make long-range plans to assist victims. Their goal is $500,000.

Even as emergency relief centers scale down operations in coming weeks, religious leaders in the San Fernando Valley are making long-range plans for material and spiritual help to people missed by government aid months after the Jan. 17 temblor.

The San Fernando Valley Interfaith Council, whose extensive social services consume much of its $2.5-million annual budget, is expected to be the major beneficiary of a $500,000 appeal for Northridge quake victims to be launched by Church World Service among mainline Protestant and Eastern Orthodox denominations. An undetermined portion of the appeal’s proceeds will go to the Los Angeles-based Southern California Ecumenical Council, administrators said Friday.

“The Valley Interfaith Council is more organized to meet people’s needs than any we have seen (at other disaster-struck areas) in the country,” said Arlene Kool of Byron Center, Mich. She and her husband, Bill, are disaster response consultants with the Christian Reformed Church who were dispatched to the Valley to represent Church World Service.

The goal of $500,000 may not be enough and may have to be increased, the administrators emphasized. The World Council of Churches has already contributed $10,000 to that appeal fund.

Many other donations are expected to find their way directly to the Chatsworth office of the interfaith council from religious groups and individuals.

“We just got $4,500 from a group in Victorville, $1,000 from a ministerial association in Louisiana and a check from a church in Massachusetts,” said Barry Smedberg, executive director of the council.

In another development, the Salvation Army--actually a church body but best known for its social work--will be leasing up to 100 condominium units from the federal government to provide low-rent, transitional housing for people made homeless by the quake.

“We’re moving out of the crisis stage into an intermediate phase for several months,” Russell Prince, executive director of development for the Salvation Army’s Southern California Division, said Friday.

“We’ve already placed about 10 families in the condominiums,” Prince said. The condominiums, primarily in the Valley, are part of the Army’s new Project EARTH (Earthquake Relief for Relocation and Transitional Housing), which had not previously been announced.

Likewise, the Seventh-day Adventists, a group that had emergency supply centers at their San Fernando, Pacoima, Van Nuys and Northridge churches and ran two mobile feeding stations with Southern Baptists, are looking toward what relief official Dan Robles called long-range rehabilitation.

“We are putting some families back on track, especially in the Hispanic community, by helping them through the maze of filling out assistance forms,” said Robles, who is based at the regional Adventist headquarters in Glendale.

“We also are trying to help people cope . . . because indeed life goes on,” he said.

Presbyterian churches in the Valley, like other congregations in a nationwide denomination, are receiving offers from outside the state of money and other kinds of help.

The Rev. Steve Frank, earthquake relief coordinator for the Presbytery of San Fernando, said some donations will have to go toward rebuilding damaged church buildings.

But in fulfilling the church mission to help others even as it hurts, Frank said the presbytery will be linking up with other cooperative relief efforts, notably the long-term effort of the Valley Interfaith Council.

The council might not have been able to forge plans for a yearlong relief project except for the timely donation--by Arthur Stevens of the Harmony Coalition--of the use of a 1,300-square-foot warehouse in Chatsworth to store supplies.

Stevens, 54, a financial services salesman whose background is Reform Jewish, said that he is following a religious experience, or vision, that appeared to clarify what he should do to help the needy. He formed a nonprofit corporation and acquired the warehouse Dec. 1.

Food, clothes, tents and other supplies--as well as toys--were trucked to the warehouse Thursday from Mormon Church sources. Another three truckloads were expected to follow, said Kimberly Schuler Hall, a Mormon public affairs representative based in Reseda.

The council, which coordinates relief efforts with such agencies as Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services, has more than 270 affiliated congregations--Protestant, Episcopal, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Bahai and Unitarian, among others.

“At the end of this project, it will be a stronger interfaith community,” predicted Smedberg, the council’s full-time administrator.

The council is holding an open, information-sharing meeting on long-term needs at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints building, 5338 White Oak Ave., Encino. Red Cross, community agencies and government aid leaders will be there along with a wide range of religious representatives, Smedberg said.

Telephone numbers for some of the above-mentioned agencies: Valley Interfaith Council (818) 718-6460; Salvation Army Project EARTH (818) 781-5739; Seventh-day Adventist Church (818) 409-0114, Presbytery of San Fernando (818) 891-4781.