CSUN GETS VOLUNTEER GRANT.

Byline: Robert Monroe Staff Writer

NORTHRIDGE - A CSUN program to train student volunteers has received more than $400,000 from the California Endowment, officials said Thursday.

The three-year grant will help train college and high school students to be better volunteers and encourage them to bring their skills back to their communities.

``This grant is aimed at making volunteers agents for change in the community,'' said Barbara Rhodes, coordinator of California State University, Northridge's DuBois-Hamer Institute.

Teen-age mentors in Rhodes' classes in the past have led leadership camps for their high school counterparts, ``Saturday Academies'' to help high schoolers struggling in math and English, and workshops to improve the study skills of middle school students.

The grant money will create Partnerships Empowering Youth to Serve, an outgrowth of the Teen Mentor program. Rhodes said she applied for the grant after surveying some 250 community service organizations. They told her they needed more and better-trained volunteers.

Mike Powers, spokesman for the Woodland Hills-based California Endowment, said PEYS fits his organization's chief mission of facilitating access to health care for underserved people, chiefly minorities.

``A lot of what the endowment stands for is multicultural health,'' Powers said. ``What CSUN wants to do is create a pipeline for minorities to enter the health professions.''

PEYS will train college and high school students - especially African- Americans, Latinos and Pacific Islanders - for a variety of volunteer projects to be determined by a community-based advisory board.

PEYS ``will express the needs that the community has identified for itself,'' Rhodes said. ``We can begin to train students to meet some of those needs.''