A Close-Up Look at People Who Matter : Strong Sense of Caring Runs in Her Family

Barbara Perkins’ childhood Saturdays were spent more often than not waiting for inebriated locals to pass by the porch of her grand aunt’s house in Nassau.

On the seven-mile island in the Bahamas, neighbors looked out for neighbors. And two doors down from the house where Perkins was being raised was the local bar. So the men who came staggering out of the saloon were, in a sense, neighbors.

So Perkins’ grand aunt would fix the men a meal, instruct them to take a nap under a shade tree in the front yard, and send them on their way.

Perkins vowed that when she grew up she wouldn’t be quite so neighborly.

Perkins laughs at that determination now. The PTA member, classroom mom and founder of the San Fernando Valley branch of the National Council of Negro Women shakes her head and says, “My grand aunt is up in heaven laughing and smiling.”

Perkins, a flight attendant with American Airlines, moved from Brooklyn Heights to Sylmar in 1985, after meeting her husband, a Los Angeles County fire captain.

“When I came here it was such a refreshing change,” she said. “I began to love the community setting.”

After her first child was born, Perkins felt a heightened sense of responsibility and a nagging need to get involved in her community.

The opportunity presented itself when her husband returned home after inspecting a site for the Black Family Reunion and encouraged Perkins to meet the organizers, the National Council of Negro Women.

Founded in 1935 by educator Mary McLeod Bethune, the service and leadership organization has more than 250 branches nationwide.

Perkins went to Downtown Los Angeles to join the local chapter. By the time she left the Council House, she had been talked into forming a chapter of her own in the San Fernando Valley.

“I said, ‘I can’t do this. I just started my own business,’ ” remembers Perkins, who had started a nanny-referral service.

And more importantly, she told the council, “I don’t know 50 African American women in the Valley.”

She knew, she estimates, three or four women.

Meda Chamberlain, the council’s regional director, told her, “OK, that’s it. That’s your start,” Perkins said.

At the first organizing meeting for the Valley branch in 1989, 11 women came to Perkins’ home.

A year later, the branch was founded with 52 women. It now counts 108 women and three men in its ranks. The men, including Stan Perkins, were accepted on the condition that they would be life members and could not hold the presidency of the group.

Since then, the group has produced a play that a council member wrote about the healing process after the riots; sponsored a teen-agers’ talkathon to help youths and adults understand each other; distributed food to 1,000 families after the Northridge earthquake; and worked with service organizations to increase outreach to the black community and increase partnership among those organizations.

Now Perkins and the council are putting together a program to help high school students learn about public service and determine in which direction they want their lives to go.

“It’s not us telling them what to do in their lives, but encouraging them,” Perkins said.

The council is also preparing earthquake survival kits for 300 families and organizing a family crisis counseling program to encourage African Americans to use the counseling services.

Perkins praises the council’s members for the group’s accomplishments. “They’ve made my dreams come true,” she said.

And about those rediscovered neighborly instincts? Perkins shrugs it off. This was just how she was raised.

“I don’t feel like this is a lot. I feel like this is my responsibility to the community,” she said. “It was my responsibility for setting an example for my children.”

Personal Best is a weekly profile of an ordinary person who does extraordinary things. Please address prospective candidates to Personal Best, Los Angeles Times, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth, 91311. Or fax them to (818) 772-3338.