Grand Results From Small Gestures

Karen Koch’s days are full of small tasks and small gestures jotted on Post-Its:

“Please make 200 copies”

“News clip, please”

“Please pack into 50s, thanks--Karen”

On any given day, Koch may sneak up on a “Groovy Award” recipient--someone who goes above and beyond the call of duty--subjecting the winner to a spontaneous ceremony involving horn blowers and pompoms and topped off with a hug.

The 52-year-old former homemaker, who has coordinated a city-sponsored volunteer program in Temple City for two years, is a tribute to the cumulative impact of hundreds of small gestures. She leads a quiet movement to build a sense of community in an age of virtual contact and ever-changing demographics.

Since Koch took over the program in 1996, the number of volunteers has grown from 58 to 400 and blossomed in ethnic diversity.

Because of the volunteers, who contributed 5,000 hours of service in the past fiscal year, a four-block strip of trees will light up for the city’s annual Christmas parade, and residents will snack on cookies and hot cocoa while they enjoy the festivities.

Because of the volunteers, a Chinese-speaking resident calling City Hall with a question about how to obtain a business license can get an instant answer in his native language.

Because of the volunteers, poor residents will receive several hundred pairs of new socks this winter.

Just as important, observers say, the volunteer program has given a badly needed sense of cohesion to this bedroom community of 33,000 with a large over-55 population and a slender white majority that is giving way to growing Asian and Latino populations.

“There was a time when people came together canning vegetables, and women would get together making quilts,” said Koch, who enrolled in Pasadena City College and USC in her 40s after raising four daughters. “Now,” she added with a laugh, “we come together and staple.”

Only a few cities in Los Angeles County boast a full-time volunteer coordinator like Koch. Her role is far more extensive than the City Council envisioned in 1995 when it created a part-time position mainly to give senior citizens a social outlet, said Councilwoman Cathe Wilson, who proposed the idea.

The council turned Koch’s job into a $24,000-a-year full-time position last year after she began attracting more volunteers, ages 8 to 90, than the city knew what to do with.

In the workroom of Koch’s City Hall office, Mary Sackal, 82, is stuffing cloth beanbags to be used to hold down balloon centerpieces for next year’s volunteer appreciation luncheon. Sackal’s husband, Albert, who is the oldest volunteer in the program at 90, and Dick Morgan, 73, are folding Neighborhood Watch guides for the Sheriff’s Department. Thirty-two-year-old homemaker Alaine Zavala is covering cardboard boxes with Christmas wrapping paper for the upcoming Sock-o-Rama, another Koch invention that collects socks for low-income and homeless people.

Back in the copy room, Koch has volunteer veteran Jagdish Oza training new volunteer Alice Jong. By late afternoon, Chris Lee and David Gonzalez will stop in to complete part of their mandatory community service hours as students of Temple City High School.

Building a Community

Koch was interviewing an 9-year-old prospective volunteer the other day when she pointed to the high school students in the work room who were cutting yarn and square pieces of construction paper for a city Halloween carnival.

“Cutting yarn--what’s the big deal?” she asked rhetorically. “It’s a big deal. . . . [In] every little thing that volunteers do is the big picture. We’re making someone happy. The events that we do are for the multitudes in the city.

“You’re building a community, and that’s what the philosophy is,” she told the boy. “People will always need people . . . so it’s important we be reminded of that.”

Koch scrupulously checks out her applicants, spending an hour on every adult applicant and training them one-on-one.

She keeps her troops well-fed. “How about some cookies?” she asked, holding out a round tin of Danish butter cookies during a routine check on her helpers. “No, we’re OK,” one replied. “You can be better,” a laughing Koch responded, extending the cookies again.

Many volunteers say they are as loyal to Koch as to the program itself. “If it was someone else, I don’t think I would come back,” said Zavala, a mother of three who said she had been turned off by school volunteer programs that left her feeling unappreciated.

“I don’t want money for what I do, but I do want respect,” she said. “Like Karen says [about me], ‘Oh, she can do anything.’ It makes me feel needed and wanted.”

The volunteer work of Warner Sun, a 69-year-old Taiwanese immigrant, reflects an urgent need in a city that has experienced a large influx of Chinese residents in the past decade. The retired real estate agent translates city ordinances into Chinese and interprets conversations between Mandarin-speaking residents and city employees. He also translates at teacher-parent conferences.

“When I come to the United States, I think we all must get together with people in the community, not like Chinese just together with other Chinese,” he said. “ I like to talk to everybody here.”

Koch, a third-generation Japanese American who says her family was one of the first Asian families to move to Temple City, purposely mixes volunteers of different backgrounds and ages so that her program can contribute to “damage control” in race relations.

Rewards of Service

The volunteers are “learning to get along with other people,” she said. “Some of them didn’t know how to.”

Volunteerism is her weapon against a society she fears is becoming increasingly isolated. “You have people who are senior citizens and not loved by society, or their families, at times, and they come here. They have a family [here]. It makes them feel self-satisfied that they’ve done something for someone else. You get a housewife who hasn’t been in the community, with no confidence. . . . Now she’s learning to do Word [software] and to work on a computer for the first time and now wanting to go back to school.

“Even with this translation program, the gratification of them knowing, ‘I really did something.’ You kind of get out of self and start helping other people.”

That’s why volunteer Dick Morgan got a get-well card a few weeks ago. Morgan mentioned he wasn’t feeling well, so Koch dropped him a note in the mail.

“That was the biggest surprise I got in 20 years,” Morgan said. “She does a lot of little things for people.”