Can Your Volunteer Program Bring America Together? This Screenwriter-Turned-Charity Leader Thinks So.

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Eric Panick is a former gang member whose face is lined with tattoos. Ferne Cassel is a Hollywood doyenne, a veteran casting director whose credits include slapstick comedies like Jim Carey’s Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. Unlikely as it seems that the two would ever cross paths, each has come this morning to the sun-drenched offices of the nonprofit Big Sunday just off Hollywood Boulevard, as they do most Thursdays.

A community-service organization, Big Sunday defies the decade-long decline in volunteerism. Each year, it deploys an army of some 50,000 to more than 2,000 service projects — for food pantries, schools, animal shelters, conservation groups, hospitals, and more. Numbers for its biggest events — among them a Martin Luther King Day clothing drive — are up as much as 40 percent. Vice President Kamala Harris turned up at last year’s Thanksgiving food drive, her second drop-by. Corporate giants such as Disney, NBCUniversal, and Kaiser-Permanente hire the group to organize their service events.

Coincidentally or not, Big Sunday has a dual mission — community service that builds community. Long before polarization balkanized America, the organization set out to help people find common ground through the pursuit of the common good. In other words, it aims to connect people through the act of helping others.

“There are a lot of people screaming at us on TV that have a vested interest in dividing people,” says Big Sunday founder and executive director David Levinson. Once a Hollywood screenwriter, Levinson gave up the glamour and nice pay to devote himself to the organization and the idea that when people work side by side — to build a fence, make a meal at a shelter, or clean up parks — differences melt away. You learn about their family, their favorite movies, the Los Angeles freeway that bedevils them. “It’s just harder to hate them.”

Joining Panick and Cassel this morning are a few dozen other volunteers. There are four corporate professionals, colleagues from an insurance company weary of the isolation of remote work. Karen Gilman is a former social worker. Serge, a young man with severe intellectual disabilities, has come with his caretaker, Mitch Johnson.

Delayed supplies have derailed the day’s planned project, so their task is makeshift: decorating and planting flower pots whose ultimate destination is unclear. No matter. As a boom box pumps out pop tunes, the volunteers talk. And talk. The volume grows until you can’t hear the person next to you.

Cassel hasn’t missed a Thursday volunteer event here in seven years. “It’s the most wonderful place in Los Angeles,” she says. She chats with three other women she met at Big Sunday; the group now regularly takes day trips together.

Serge, meanwhile, happily roams the room. He is largely antisocial, Johnson says, “but he gets excited when I tell him we’re coming here.”

Screenwriter to Charity Leader

Levinson moves among the tables, cracking jokes and asking after families and pets. He’s 64, with a mop of curly, graying hair, a Big Sunday T-shirt, and the infectious enthusiasm of a camp counselor. He knows almost everyone in the room as well as their back story.

Panick’s intimidating tattoos, for instance, belie what Levinson has found is a genuine sweetness. His mother was shot and confined to a wheelchair, so he grew up largely with his grandmother, a nurse in the Korean War, and his grandfather, an Army sergeant. “I was raised right,” he says. “I’ve got my street mentality, but I also know how to get it together.”

“David has been cool,” Panick says. “He’s looked out for me.”

Levinson is an accidental charity leader. In 1999, he was still working as a screenwriter when his rabbi at Temple Israel of Hollywood asked him to run the synagogue’s first Mitzvah service day. He rounded up some 300 “good-hearted Jewish people” for the Sunday event but concluded that it was “weird” to do community work without involving more of the community.

The next year, Levinson recruited partners, among them: a local Daughters of the American Revolution chapter, the private school that his three kids attended, a Black Protestant church where friends were members, a predominantly gay Jewish synagogue, and a Lutheran church whose sign at Christmas time featured the note: “Happy Hanukkah to our Jewish friends.”

“I figured they’d be game,” he says.

Over the years, Levinson began to devote more of his time to Mitzvah Day. Although he loved his work and sold screenplays for tidy sums, none ever got produced. Big Sunday “wasn’t born of altruism,” Levinson says. “It was born of anger, frustration, and depression.”

The organization boomed in the mid-2000s and shifted to a multiday event after then-Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a champion of volunteerism, talked it up and put city services behind it.

Big Sunday became a 501(c)(3) in 2008, with Levinson as executive director and Marta Kauffman, an Emmy-winning co-creator of Friends, as chairwoman of the board. Neither knew much about running a nonprofit, Levinson says. “At the first board meeting, I said: ‘Listen, guys, I can get a thousand people on a playground tomorrow to fix up a school. But I don’t know diddly about running a nonprofit.’”

‘It Gave Her Joy to Give Back’

Big Sunday now runs events 365 days a year, and Levinson has become a go-to resource for many nonprofits and schools. “David has such a great network,” says Sister Margaret Farrell, spiritual director of Covenant House in California, a Catholic nonprofit that runs a shelter in Los Angeles for young adults who lack homes. “When I have a problem, the first thing I’ll do is think, ‘Let me ask David for advice.’”

Uttara Natarajan, a psychiatric social worker at several Los Angeles schools, says she calls Levinson whenever a need arises. Big Sunday has secured backpacks, books, snacks, and more for her students.

When a mother at one of the schools was about to be evicted from their apartment, Big Sunday approached the landlord, paid the rent she owed and for several additional months, and invited her to join its volunteer projects. “She looked forward to going,” Natarajan says. “It gave her joy to give back.”

Elizabeth Bowen, director of nursing for a hospice care group, first came to Big Sunday seven years ago after she and her daughter, then 13, moved to Los Angeles. “We didn’t know a soul,” Bowen says. On a whim, they came out for the organization’s MLK clothing drive. “The street was closed, there was music, and people were climbing all over this mountain of clothes,” she remembers. “It was so much fun.”

Bowen, who hadn’t yet found a job, decided, “I’m sticking with these guys.” She volunteered for projects ranging from giving baths to basset hounds at a shelter to serving meals on Skid Row. “I met fabulous people and made friends for life,” she says. “I really feel like I found a community here.”

Nonprofits don’t typically fashion their volunteer programs as community-building enterprises. “Organizations don’t think in these terms,” says Nathan Dietz, an expert on volunteerism at the University of Maryland’s Do Good Institute. With the limited time and resources for organizing volunteers, nonprofits typically recruit from silos — individual businesses and houses of worship, for instance — and simply try to make sure everyone has a good experience so that they’ll come back.

Levinson, however, thinks it’s easier than you might think. “Sincerely, if I could do this, anybody can.”

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