Lower Turnout but High Energy Mark Care Day

Franklin Ensoy was getting impatient. He’d gotten up early to do some work--any work--as part of a mass volunteer effort across the city Saturday called Community Care Day, an event to kick off the United Way of Greater Los Angeles’ 34th annual fund-raising campaign. But so far, all he’d done was listen to speeches, eat bagels and mill around.

“Almost three hours!” he exclaimed, looking at his watch. “We’ve wasted so much time.”

Ensoy, 45, a tidy, quiet man wearing a neat aqua polo shirt, jokingly batted the air with his fists in a burst of impatience.

An employee of the Northridge Target store, Ensoy was among an estimated 450 volunteers recruited by employers in the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys for the sixth annual Community Care Day. The volunteers worked at two schools and two nonprofit agencies in the Valley.

The purpose of Community Care Day is to give United Way-funded agencies an inexpensive way to catch up on needed improvements and to draw attention to the upcoming campaign, said United Way spokesman Max Gallegos.

This year’s event got a late start partly because of layoffs and spending cutbacks at United Way, Gallegos said. Also, an initial proposal to concentrate this year’s effort on a few large projects in Central and East Los Angeles was scrapped after Valley participants protested that the Valley should be included, said Gallegos.

The result was less time to recruit people and a lower turnout in the Valley, as well as across the county.

And as might be expected when hundreds of people try to organize themselves, there was lots of improvisation and some chaos--for example, a chronic paint shortage at a Vaughn Street school.

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Ensoy’s group of volunteers had been told to start painting at Vaughn Next Century Learning Center but had been given no paint. Someone was bringing some, somebody said.

So while other groups were getting to work on other parts of the elementary school, painting classrooms and planting shrubs, Ensoy and the Target crew sat on benches, itching to get started.

It was a new experience for Ensoy, a Filipino immigrant who works 80-hour weeks at two jobs, lives alone in a guest house in Mission Hills and was volunteering for the first time.

But if he was frustrated by the free-form structure of the day, others were clearly thriving on it: One woman had appointed herself paint scout and was scouring the school for surplus cans. Another circled the campus, handing out bottled water.

When a can of yellow paint finally appeared, it was Ensoy who took the lead, finding a screwdriver to open the lid and applying the first coat with a roller on a row of playground lockers.

“This is a good change for me,” he said. “At work, there’s too much pressure. But here, there’s no pressure.”

As the volunteers got sweatier and dirtier, they turned their radios up and slugged down soft drinks.

Besides Ensoy, the Target group included Olga Simon, 25, a blue-eyed, curly-haired clerk from Honduras, who brought her father, a brother and her boyfriend, Gustavo Martinelli, a pony-tailed soccer enthusiast from Argentina.

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There was also Nicole Nordstrom, 23, who wore a smiley-face T-shirt and black nail polish. And there was Rachel Williams, 24, a first-time volunteer and mother of a 4-year-old, who said she wanted to help fix a school because her son would attend one.

But of the group, Ensoy was the most diligent. He dusted the lockers, scraped away chipped paint and painted tirelessly. When Simon and Nordstrom started grabbing every color they could find, Ensoy protested. “They should be uniform!” he said.

But by the end of the day, Ensoy, too, was slathering green and red over yellow and laughing. “This is great. It’s a lot of fun,” he said, adding: “But we may need a couple more hours. We should have started earlier.”