David Levinson: Accidental activist

In the introduction to his new book about volunteering, “Everyone Helps, Everyone Wins” (Hudson Street Press), Big Sunday founder and executive director David Levinson warns readers not to mistake him for a good person.

“Make no mistake,” he writes, “I fell into this not out of kindness or a sense of mission. I did it out of frustration and anger and depression. I sometimes joke that I had a choice between becoming an alcoholic or a humanitarian. I’m a lousy drinker, so I became a humanitarian.”

Such is Levinson’s self-deprecating humor, which is on display throughout the book’s more than 270 pages. He blends memoir with handbook, offering useful advice for any person, family, school, faith group or business interested in giving back.

“There are some books out there about volunteering, and some of them tend to be kind of sanctimonious,” Levinson said during a recent interview at the Big Sunday offices on Melrose Avenue. “I really wanted to write a book that said, ‘You know what, if you can’t do Darfur, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person …’ My whole thing was inclusiveness.”

Originally from Boston, Levinson, 51, moved to Los Angeles in the 1980s to write feature comedies. He sold his first script — a caper — along with others, but none was ever produced. With his scripts stuck in development hell, he turned to charity to distract himself, eventually founding Big Sunday, an L.A.-based nonprofit and volunteer network that has grown to become the largest organization of its kind in the country.

Big Sunday started as a Mitzvah Day at Temple Israel of Hollywood in 1999, drawing about 200 volunteers to landscaping and clean-up projects. This past spring, Big Sunday drew about 50,000 people to more than 500 volunteer projects around Southern California — from San Diego to Santa Barbara.

Despite its name, Big Sunday now stretches over an entire weekend in April or May and has drawn major corporate sponsors, including Toyota, Disney and Paramount Pictures. In 2006, L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa tapped Big Sunday as an official city event.

Levinson says his wife and three children were early supporters of his second career. 

“Ellie and the kids have all made enormous contributions to Big Sunday, year after year, and it’s important to our family,” he writes, “but they each have their own passions and their own projects that they love, that they’ve worked hard on, and that depend on them.”

Throughout the book, Levinson pays tribute to volunteers, telling stories of friends, colleagues and family members who have turned out at the last minute to visit people living with HIV/AIDS, chipped in at painting projects at low-income schools, cooked meals for homeless families and helped with makeovers for girls who couldn’t afford one.

“I’d love to say that Big Sunday is a success because I am so brilliant and talented,” he writes. “But of course that’s not true. There have been thousands of wonderful people who made it happen, in ways large and small.”

More than a decade after founding Big Sunday, spreading the word about volunteering is a full-time preoccupation for Levinson, who was named 2009 Nonprofit Leader of the Year as part of the National Conference on Volunteering and Service.

He writes that everyone has some special skill they can share, “but they often need someone to reach out to them to let them know how they can share it.”

And when it comes to volunteers, he’s worked with enough people to know that everybody has a different relationship with and reason for volunteering. In the chapter “So, Why Are You Volunteering?” he writes: “As far as I’m concerned there is no right or wrong answer. Sure it seems better to want to volunteer than to have to. Yet, in the end, people help and people get helped. To me, it’s all good.”

Levinson wraps up the book with an appendix on “52 Ways You Can Help in the Coming Year,” complete with a list of what you can do (e.g., give blood, sing to folks at a nursing home, have a book collection for kids) and advice on where you can do it, what you can expect and what you can watch out for.

He acknowledges that his work with Big Sunday has brought about a personal transformation. Suddenly it didn’t matter as much if he couldn’t sell a screenplay or if a script wasn’t being produced. “My problems always seemed small — silly, even — by comparison,” he writes. “I mean, how could I be upset that some 24-year-old development exec was rejecting my script when I was talking with a family who’d been living under a bridge?”

So, while Levinson initially set out to help others by starting Big Sunday, helping others inevitably helped him.

“There was never any question,” he writes, “but that the one I’d helped the most was myself.”

David Levinson will read from and sign copies of “Everyone Helps, Everyone Wins” at Barnes & Noble at the Grove, Third Street and Fairfax Avenue, Oct. 20, 7 p.m. Free. (323) 525-0270.