Big Sunday draws hundreds to projects across SoCal [SLIDESHOW]

Ben Morris beamed with pride as he stood back and watched his fellow volunteers paint a mural for the Los Angeles Ministry Project’s playground in South Los Angeles during Big Sunday, a weekend-long Southland charity event that took place May 1-2.

“Sometimes when you look at a big project, it can feel overwhelming,” said Morris, an IT technician and Leo Baeck Temple congregant, who volunteered with Big Sunday for the first time this year. “What you do is you find a little piece — a little part of the wall, so to speak — and you start working on that little piece of the wall. Over time, all of you working together on those little pieces end up creating something that is really powerful.”

Big Sunday started in 1999 as a Jewish event — a mitzvah day organized by Temple Israel of Hollywood with about 200 volunteers who worked on landscaping and cleanup projects. L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa declared Big Sunday an official city event in 2006, and this year the celebration of life and generosity broke past city boundaries, drawing together more than 50,000 volunteers from different walks of life to more than 500 projects between San Diego and Santa Barbara, said David Levinson, the founder of Big Sunday.

“We’ve been working with other synagogues, with churches, with mosques, with schools, with businesses, with clubs. We have no religious or political agenda at all,” said Levinson, who throughout the weekend hustled between Big Sunday’s new headquarters on Melrose Avenue and project sites. “The agenda is to concentrate on what unites us, rather than what divides us. Every single person has some way that they can help somebody else.”

In a warehouse near Echo Park, the Derby Dolls, an all-female roller derby league, showed girls from Children of the Night, an organization that rescues kids from prostitution, that it is OK to fall as long as you get back on your feet.

“It’s something that they don’t think they can do,” said Rebecca “Demolicious” Ninburg, a co-founder of the league.

Ninburg watched as Derby Dolls skaters guided the Children of the Night girls around the pink-painted flat track of the Doll Factory, where the Dolls practice and compete.

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For many of the girls from Children of the Night, it was their first time on skates.

“These girls have never had a childhood,” said Lois Lee, Children of the Night’s founder and president.

Skating with the Derby Dolls “shows me that I can be a kid again,” said Jessica, a 15-year-old former prostitute who asked to have her name changed to protect her identity.

At 24th Street Elementary School, near the historic West Adams neighborhood, more than 400 volunteers — including Progressive Jewish Alliance staff and members — worked with the Garden School Foundation on a one-acre garden located on the school’s grounds, where lettuce, greens, flowers and herbs are grown and sold by the students in a weekly farmers’ market.